Quick to Listen: Recent Episodes

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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.

recommendedWorship Together or Bowl AloneBrad East

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.

relatedAmericans’ Return to Church Has PlateauedKate Shellnutt

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.

relatedWhy In-Person Church Will Never Go Out of StylePhilip Yancey

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.

The post No More Sundays on the Couch appeared first on Christianity Today.

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You may be tempted to read The Pursuit of Safety: A Theology of Danger, Risk, and Security with an eye toward determining whether and to what extent its author, Wheaton College theologian Jeremy Lundgren, agrees with your own risk assessments and safety measures.

Don’t.

Though Lundgren leaves some hints about where he lands on discrete safety questions—most controversially, COVID-era rules and parenting decisions—his interest here is the bigger picture. Pursuit is an expansive examination of how Western culture prioritizes safety above other values and barely questions certain methods of ensuring it.

Lundgren rightly draws our attention to assumptions about safety so familiar we often fail to notice them, let alone consider their moral implications. He issues a timely call to churches to develop theologies of safety before they’re needed. And he effectively indicts modern bureaucrats who fiddle with past safety accomplishments but don’t consider the consequences.

But Pursuit also leaves key matters insufficiently addressed. One, about our culpability for unintentional harms, gets only a brief mention even though it could have far-reaching implications for day-to-day life. Another, about violence and other deliberate human harms, is part of a strange silence throughout the text. Lundgren attends primarily to safety from accidents.

Noticing the scenery“The world we inhabit is scattered with tokens of safety,” Lundgren observes early in the book, “the warnings, notices, slogans, and labels that have been so thoroughly incorporated into the modern landscape.” Safety is literally part of the scenery, and that makes it easy to miss how its pursuit shapes our lives and informs our moral judgments.

Of course, it is good to be safe. Lundgren affirms that repeatedly. But he also observes that safety is not the only—or, for the Christian, the paramount—good that exists in the world. His aim is not to steer readers away from safety but to warn against pursuing it uncritically and at the expense of other goods we ought to value more.

That’s a tall order in the 21st century. For decades now, safety has had “an elevated moral status” in Western culture, Lundgren argues:

In an era typified by the lack of a cohesive moral framework, safety is something of an unquestioned, and therefore unifying, virtue. Its unifying power can be seen in the pervasiveness and homogeneity of the tokens of safety across all spheres of life. Safety has an authoritative ethical place in our world, influencing how we make decisions, interact with creation, respond to hardship, and relate with each other. Declaring something unsafe is generally equivalent to declaring it wrong.

That wasn’t always the case. The human need for safety is a historical constant, but our society’s practices for pursuing it are novel. I can’t recount the linguistic, mathematical, religious, and technological history Lundgren relays, but it’s useful equipment for understanding how we think about safety today, how we thought differently in the past, and how our attitudes might change going forward.

This portion of Pursuit includes important exhortations to prudence in a procedure-dependent age. Don’t simply follow the rules of safety, Lundgren urges. Develop wise and humane judgment and shoulder the responsibility that comes with it. There’s also an admirable rejection of chronological snobbery here, as well as a sharp critique of how our safety apparatuses continue to grow even after major risks have been ameliorated and all that remains is relatively minor fine-tuning.

It’s Time to Forgive Each Other Our Pandemic SinsPaul D. Miller

Alongside that broader discussion, Lundgren reliably returns to theological questions: whether, how, and why the church’s pursuit of safety should differ from the world’s. Safety, again, is a good thing—but it is not better than Christ, nor is it a good we can perfectly acquire and maintain before the full redemption of a fallen creation. “The resolution of humanity’s battle with danger,” Lundgren writes, “will not take place within the horizons of history.”

While that battle continues, though, he calls Christians to build a theology of safety before danger strikes. The contemporary Western church was caught flat-footed when COVID-19 and its containment policies appeared, Lundgren says, because we never had to think much about safety in the past. (How little of humanity can say the same!)

Lundgren never spells out his preferred pandemic policies, but even if you think he’s hinting in the wrong direction, his push for a more deliberate theology of safety is needful. Having one wouldn’t have guaranteed the same pandemic decisions from every local congregation. But I do think it could have encouraged choices grounded more in Christ-centered prudence, care, and courage than in partisanship or instinct.

COVID and culpabilityOn the subject of COVID, there’s a portion of The Pursuit of Safety concerned with unintentional sins. It’s part of a larger discussion of accidents—more on that in a moment—but here Lundgren’s focus narrows to the moral status of accidents that cause harm. The discussion is heavily informed by how the Mosaic Law deals with acts like unintentional killings, and much of Lundgren’s interest here is in forgiveness.

“All lawlessness is sin,” he writes, “whether intentional or unintentional. Accidents—such as dropping a rock, using a malfunctioning ax, or forgetting a boiling pot of water—may not, in themselves, be sins if they cause no harm. But they are frequently the result of other sins such as impatience, pride, or worry, and they may become sins if they lead to harm.”

Few would quibble, I expect, with the idea that a person who accidentally starts a fire by forgetting a boiling pot is responsible for that fire and must make amends. But if that accident isn’t the result of another sin (and it’s easy to imagine scenarios in which the forgetfulness is not sin-related), does responsible necessarily mean culpable? Is that forgetfulness necessarily sinful?

The question becomes even more pressing when Lundgren turns to the transmission of infectious diseases, like COVID-19 and the flu:

Sometimes a person’s actions set in motion a sequence of events that result in harm to others, but the person never knows. When the Covid virus first began to spread, efforts were made, with minimal success, to trace the web of its transmission. The actions of many, knowingly or unknowingly, intentionally or unintentionally, were part of that web with its sometimes harmful and occasionally fatal consequences. While a spotlight was put on the spread of this particular virus, human interactions and movements contribute to the spread of viruses constantly. The common flu is transmitted through seemingly innocuous movements and gestures, yet it is the cause of death for tens of thousands of people in America every year.

That is a complete paragraph, and it comes at the end of the section in which Lundgren says that “all lawlessness is sin” and unintentional killings are “transgressions, violations of the law and ‘an intrinsic offense’ against God.” While the next section doesn’t address infectious disease transmission, it reaffirms that “accidental harm is sin.” Yet it tempers that judgment by saying God “has not burdened us with a system of morality based on fate or chance in which people are responsible either for their part in an endless chain of unchangeable events or for the random and unknowable results of their actions.”

So does Lundgren think we sin when we unwittingly spread a flu bug? Are we culpable for that kind of accidental harm? I think that’s his implication. But if a virus mistaken for an allergy or a presymptomatic bus ride are sins, then surely Lundgren’s discussion of forgiveness and amends for known harms is not enough. You could reach “ZeroCovid” extremes with a view of sin like that.

Safety and securityThe subtitle of Pursuit mentions “security,” and early on Lundgren briefly distinguishes between security and safety, linking security to intentional harm (“murder, war, abuse, theft, and sabotage”) and safety to unintentional harm (“accidents, crashes, injuries, and mishaps, occasions when harm comes about through carelessness, chaos, or unanticipated events”). But then he concedes that the two words are “synonyms, with a high degree of overlap in meaning and usage,” and he never places security and intentional harm outside the book’s scope.

Yet as The Pursuit of Safety proceeds, it overwhelmingly considers unintentional harm. Lundgren does mention school shootings and dangerous missionary work, but not at length. He doesn’t dwell on the modern state of security, even though its trappings—and especially visible post-9/11 changes like airport security and mass surveillance—will have shaped many readers’ thinking on safety. And though he gives attention to natural and spiritual evil, deliberate human evil is strangely neglected in favor of workplace and traffic accidents.

This Is the Violent World in Which Christ Commands PeaceMyles Werntz

Some of that imbalance surely owes to the history Lundgren reviews. Much of it concerns the wildly unsafe workplaces of the early Industrial Revolution and the pro-safety activism and bureaucracy that emerged to tame them. But a century after the Progressive Era, the danger of workplace accidents doesn’t loom quite so largely for most of us.

Indeed, insofar as we manage any scrutiny of safety culture and its tradeoffs, we tend to apply the lens of intentional harms, not accidents. The pandemic is a recent exception to that pattern, but typically we have debates about things like the value of childhood freedom versus the risk of kidnapping, the value of civil liberties versus the risk of terrorism, or the value of digital free speech versus the risk of disinformation and verbal abuse.

Beyond that mismatch, Lundgren’s attention to accidents also allows him to avoid directly addressing whether Christians can ever resort to violence in our pursuit of safety. Much of his language—not to mention the extensive citations of Dietrich Bonhoeffer—suggests Lundgren is commending some variant of Christian nonviolence.

“It is possible to anticipate and avoid certain types of danger,” he writes, “but to do so in an immoral way that exposes you to other types of dangers, a way that is not rightly formed by love of neighbor or love of God, but is based on anticipations that are not rightly formed by Scripture’s prophetic testimony regarding the future.” Lundgren warns against allowing the pursuit of safety to become “idolatrous, the strivings of the nations,” and emphasizes “the priority of keeping one’s way pure over keeping it safe.”

Life’s risks, he advises, should not stop us “from doing what is good and right.” He reminds readers that “Christ’s disciples are called to give up physical well-being, even to the point of death, for his sake. When the call of Christ conflicts with the pursuit of safety, the call of Christ prevails.” And, crucially, Lundgren describes enemy love as “quite reasonable to those whose lives are held secure by the love of God.”

None of this necessitates a Christian pacifist reading. But that’s a plausible interpretation, and the status of violence for Christians is an important element of any theology of safety. Is eschewing violence how we keep our way pure? Is nonviolence essential to following the example and call of Christ? At the end of Pursuit, I don’t know what Lundgren would say, but less on accidents and more on violence would have been clarifying.

Even with that imbalance, however, The Pursuit of Safety is a bracing and informative call to resilience and critical thinking, to trust in God and hope in the Resurrection, to notice unintended consequences, and to get on with a life of following Jesus instead of endlessly making sure.

Bonnie Kristian is the editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today.

The post Safety Shouldn’t Come First appeared first on Christianity Today.

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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.

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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!”)

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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 is the author of the audio series The Last Two Years and the cofounder of Estuaries.

The post What Would Lecrae Do? appeared first on Christianity Today.

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The success of “In Christ Alone” established Keith Getty as one of the leading songwriters in what he refers to as the modern hymn movement. The popular breakout song—which has remained on Christian Copyright Licensing International’s Top 100 list for over 15 years—has come to represent the musical priorities and values of Getty Music, the organization founded by Getty and his wife and collaborator Kristyn.

Their team has since developed 38 of the 500 most-used songs in US and UK churches, and Getty Music draws thousands of music-minded Christians to its annual Sing! Conference.

At the Gaylord Opryland in Nashville last month, attendees could purchase tumblers and tote bags printed with “In Christ Alone.” The song’s singable, soaring melody, simple four-verse form, and lyrics that reflect on the life, death, and resurrection of Christ have made it the model modern hymn.

“The Gettys don’t mince words about what Christ did for us,” said Jim Ouse, a repeat Sing! attendee. The 82-year-old grandfather from Wilmington, North Carolina, came with his daughter and three of her six children. “The music is theologically rich.”

For some, the Gettys and their emphasis on modern hymns represent a countermovement in the mainstream contemporary worship music industry, which is currently dominated by worship artists from megachurches like Hillsong and Elevation. Attendees of Sing! talked about their preference for hymns because of their tendency to include text that covers a lot of theological ground, and they sometimes made a comparison to more repetitive, lyrically simple, or ambiguous contemporary worship music.

The crowd at Sing! was noticeably multi-generational; babies babbled throughout the conference sessions, school-age children stood on their chairs to see the stage, and a substantial percentage of the crowd was over the age of 65. Older and younger attendees milling around the conference center spoke of the importance of singing and having access to music that explicitly conveys Reformed theology. This year’s conference theme, “Songs of the Bible,” appealed to those who prefer songs with text that they can confidently trace to the Word of God.

“If we’re going to sing, I want to sing something from Scripture,” said Karen Pederson, a retired teacher and choir director from Tioga, North Dakota.

“This music is scripturally based,” said Derrick Bridges, a musician and worship leader in Nashville. “And it’s not too complicated; it’s easy to sing.”

The perception that the Gettys operate outside or on the fringe of the mainstream worship music industry is occasionally encouraged by Keith Getty, who jokingly refers to the “dumb six-line songs” to which he offers an alternative. Fans of the Gettys see their music as a needed antidote to shallow praise and worship in their churches. The lyrical density of the Gettys’ modern hymns is a signpost of depth, and many say that their commitment to “singing theology” is what brings them to Sing!

“The theology in the music is sound, Reformed, and historically rooted,” said Daniel Troy, a software developer and volunteer at the conference. “And it’s truly congregational. It’s singable.”

Sing!’s Reformed identity comes from the Gettys’ roots in Irish Presbyterianism, as well as the relationships they have forged with influential Reformed evangelicals like John Piper, Alistair Begg, and John MacArthur. The Gettys’ popularity has grown over the past 20 years alongside the “Young, Restless, and Reformed” movement, and the emphasis on singing the “songs of the Bible” is consistent with the Calvinist practice of psalm-singing, tracing back to the 16th century.

But a scan of the event’s sponsors and partners reveals a relatively ecumenical supporting ecosystem: The Voice of the Martyrs, Crossway, Cedarville University, Planning Center, and Museum of the Bible, to name a few.

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The Gettys split their time between Northern Ireland and Nashville. Their first Sing! Conference was hosted in 2017 at Brentwood Baptist Church in Music City. The now-annual event at the Opryland convention center draws thousands for three days of congregational worship, preaching, and networking. This year, over 6,500 people attended in person, representing 50 US states and 32 countries. According to Getty Music, over 30,000 viewers tuned in to the conference livestream.

The Gettys’ emphasis on text-focused hymnody and incorporation of musical characteristics and genre markers from folk music, traditional Irish music, and bluegrass have helped them carve out a unique niche in the landscape of contemporary praise and worship music. Their varied style has also attracted devoted fans who are willing to travel to participate in an annual worship conference.

Graham Ellis, an 83-year-old concert organizer from Wales, said he came to volunteer at Sing! because he believes that the Gettys’ music is part of a project that all Christians can get behind: enriching the worship of the global church through music that teaches the Bible in a Bible-illiterate world.

“I want people to come and hear the Bible and to be ministered to,” said Ellis. “The Gettys’ goal is to teach the Scriptures, evangelize the world, and reach whole families.”

Elaine Koester, a retired Reformed minister from rural Indiana, said that the Gettys’ “excellent music with excellent theology” is what drew her to the conference. “The music and worship is all shaped by the Word of God.”

A recurrent feature of this year’s conference was the forthcoming Sing! Hymnal, which the Gettys are publishing with Crossway in 2025. A small prototype of the hymnal was provided to each attendee at this year’s conference, and when Keith Getty addressed the crowd at the opening of the first session, he said, “Please turn to number four in your hymnal.”

Thousands stood and turned to the hymn “All PeopleThat on Earth Do Dwell” (the final verse of the hymn is recognized by many as “The Doxology”) as a synthesized organ played the opening chords.

Baton in hand, Getty conducted the conference congregation, eventually joined by an orchestra. In addition to the hymnals in their hands, singers had access to the written notation and text on the projection screens. The second selection was “How Great Thou Art,” which the congregation sang with equal gusto.

Historically, “How Great Thou Art” and the tune “Old Hundredth” (to which “The Doxology” and “All Creatures That on Earth Do Dwell” are both set) are separated by centuries. The former took shape across the 19th and 20th centuries, eventually popularized in the US by Billy Graham’s crusades. The latter is a hymn tune first published in the 1551 Genevan Psalter.

At Sing!, these beloved hymns of the faith from different eras of church history are part of the same cultural project. They support the modern hymn movement by providing both a model and a musical lineage for new songs that are conceived of as “hymn-like” rather than as additions to the digital songbook of contemporary praise and worship music.

While most people on the platform at Sing! didn’t openly criticize contemporary worship music or its most popular creators, many attendees agreed the music of the Gettys and the songwriters on their team is a welcome departure from what they perceive as more “mainstream” worship music. Some of the endorsements in the sample Sing! Hymnal suggest that the Gettys are reviving a better or truer form of musical worship.

The Gettys “have been used by the Lord to provide theologically rich, singable music for the church in this generation,” wrote John MacArthur, pastor of Grace Community Church in California and Chancellor of Master’s Seminary, a prominently featured sponsor of the conference. “More than anyone else they have led in the long-awaited revival of hymns which have always been the true music of the church.”

In his endorsement, Alistair Begg, pastor of Parkside Church in Ohio (where the Gettys once served as worship leaders), called the hymnal “theologically sound and melodically enlivening.” Joni Eareckson Tada, founder of the Joni and Friends International Disability Center, wrote, “This hymnal will be a timeless collection of theologically rich songs that will set your heart soaring!”

Despite the implication that modern hymns have a monopoly on “theological richness,” the distinction between the modern hymn movement and the broader world of contemporary praise and worship is blurry, even at Sing!

The cohort of performers and cowriters gathered by the Gettys is not an exclusively modern hymn-focused group. On the second night of the conference, recording artist and author Andrew Peterson staged a performance of his selections from his concept album, Behold the Lamb of God. Sandra McCracken, a singer-songwriter who has collaborated with numerous popular worship artists like All Sons & Daughters, is also on the Gettys’ writing team.

On the final evening of the conference, special guest and contemporary Christian music giant Michael W. Smith appeared for a short on-stage conversation with Keith Getty followed by a performance of Smith’s “Agnus Dei.”

In many ways, “Agnus Dei” is a quintessential contemporary worship song, featuring two simple sections, “Alleluia, for the Lord God Almighty Reigns” and “Holy, holy are you Lord God Almighty / Worthy is the Lamb, Amen,” that can be repeated and varied in intensity.

The vocal line stretches the first syllable of “Alleluia” over multiple notes, a contrast to the text-focused, syllabic writing (one syllable per note) of the Gettys’ music. The song’s lyrics are from Revelation chapters 4 and 5, making it an easy fit for the theme, “Songs of the Bible,” but the selection was, nonetheless, a contrast—perhaps a nod to the potential for the modern hymn movement to act not as an antagonistic contrast to other popular worship music but as a partner.

Keith and Kristyn Getty: Singing Isn’t Just for SundayInterview by Steve Guthrie

In his sermon during the first plenary session, John Piper spoke at length about the relationship between heart and mind in musical worship. The influential pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis affirmed the importance of theologically sound text, with a caution against treating it as a goal in itself.

“I don’t want anyone to assume that Scripture is an end in itself, that truth is an end in itself, that lyrics are an end in themselves. They are servants of Godward emotions,” Piper said. “The mind exists to serve the heart … right thinking is never an end in itself.”

Singing words that expound theology, in Piper’s view, ought to be in service of turning one’s heart and affections toward God. At a gathering where so many in the crowd spoke of their commitment to “theologically rich” text, Piper’s sermon seemed directed against putting particular songs in a spiritual hierarchy.

For attendees like Stan Fitzenrider, the Gettys’ music isn’t appealing because he believes it’s “better” in some way but because it speaks to his emotions. The form and characteristics of hymns are more familiar to him and closely associated with his own faith journey.

“When my wife died a few years ago, this music really touched me,” said Fitzenrider, 73. “It brought me closer to God and helped me heal.”

The post The Gettys’ Modern Hymn Movement Has Theological Pull appeared first on Christianity Today.

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Gen Z evangelicals don’t want to be known for their faith.

Instead, they want their talents, interests, hobbies, and education levels to be the ways they make a name for themselves.

They see their faith as a support during challenging times. Prayer is the second most common way that they cope with stress, tied with distracting themselves by watching or reading something.

And while they may often be regarded as an “anxious generation,” they are optimistic about the future. Four in five Gen Z evangelicals believe that they can make a meaningful impact in the world for succeeding generations.

Young Life offered CT an exclusive look at these evangelical breakouts from its recent release of The Relate Project, a study which examined the beliefs and aspirations of 7,261 young people between 13 and 24 years old.

The study covered eight countries: the US, the UK, Mexico, India, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Tanzania. It surveyed adolescents of various faiths in July and August 2023. The sample of Christians from the study included those who identified as Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, or other.

Overall, it found that belief in God is integral in boosting Gen Z’s sense of purpose and well-being.

“Young people can experience flourishing apart from faith, but our research found that those without a faith frame (e.g., atheists, agnostics, and nones) report lower levels of flourishing,” the report stated.

Researchers also noted that cultural differences might account for variations in responses. For example, focus groups found that young adults in the four East African countries and India are generally more hesitant to talk to older adults because they fear incurring their disapproval.

For this story, “global” refers to the eight countries surveyed by Young Life.

Reputation and recognitionAt least half of young evangelicals in the US and UK said that they wanted to be known for their talents (54%), as well as their interests or hobbies (52%).

Only around 1 in 3 (32%) wanted to be recognized for their religion or beliefs.

Survey results were similar in East Africa, India, and Mexico. Just under half (43%) of Gen Z evangelicals in these countries preferred to be known for their educational qualifications, while 2 in 5 (40%) wanted their talents to be recognized first.

The desire to be identified by their religion or beliefs ranked fourth (27%).

These findings are consistent with what Alexis Kwamy has observed about Gen Z believers in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, where he is based.

“This shift suggests a new way of integrating faith into daily life, where religious identity isn’t always openly expressed but is instead intertwined with personal achievements and social contributions,” Kwamy told CT.

Chris Agnew, a Pioneer Mission leader at Coastal Church in Portrush, Northern Ireland, agreed. “Religion is either a dirty word, or it’s a private thing,” he said. “Spirituality would be more warmly received, but it’s easier to say to someone [that] you’re good at singing or playing football than having a faith or engaging in church.”

Other leaders think that the survey findings are debatable.

“Young people introduced to Christ at an early age appreciate [being known for their] religious beliefs,” said Patrick Barasa, general secretary of campus ministry Focus Uganda. “It’s those that tend towards secularism that live according to interests.”

The traditional format of church participation may also contribute to how Gen Z evangelical identity is being formed, said Mary Olguin, general secretary of student ministry Compa (Compañerismo Estudiantil) in Mexico.

There is a perception that “a Christian is excellent based on how they serve (for example, by showcasing their talent in worship), rather than by their fruits,” she said.

relatedGive Gen Z Students Some CreditTom Lin

Raychel Sanders, 21, is an avid runner and rock climber. But she has learned to also be comfortable building a public Christian identity.

As a freshman at Mississippi State University, she commented on the beauty and intricacy of creation during a conversation with an agnostic professor at school. She remembers he gave her a funny look.

Since that incident, however, Sanders has answered her professor’s questions about Christianity and shared her faith with him several times.

Beyond being recognized for her outdoor pursuits, she wants to be known for “having compassion on people for the sake of winning them to Christ, but without compromising on what is true,” she said.

Other young adults, like Ananya Rachel Mathew from Uttar Pradesh, India, asserted that one’s abilities can be used to represent and honor God.

“All our talents come as a gift from our Father above,” said the 21-year-old, who enjoys singing, dancing, and painting. “The Father who has bestowed our talents upon us [would] be pleased if we employed them to praise and glorify his name.”

Prayer and stressGlobally, prayer ranks second (43%) among Gen Z evangelicals as a coping mechanism for stress and is tied with distracting themselves by watching or reading something (43%). Listening to music is ranked first (62%), while reading or meditating on Scripture is ranked fifth from last (19%).

Gen Zers tend to lead a fast-paced life and may not make time for individual prayer, says Olguin in Mexico. “This dynamic often causes prayer, which is often perceived as a passive practice or not directly linked to their immediate achievements, to be relegated to the background or performed quickly and mechanically,” she said.

Yet Olguin noticed that more students attended Compa’s prayer meetings after the pandemic and believes this is because they enjoy praying in community.

relatedWhat the Asbury Revival Taught Me About Gen ZKevin Brown

Though public prayer may come naturally to young Mexican evangelicals, that’s not the case with the teenagers Bruce Campbell works with at his Northern Ireland–based youth ministry, Exodus.

“The most common fear I hear young people expressing in terms of prayer is their fear of praying out loud in a group setting,” he said.

Campbell has noticed a rising interest in listening to worship music among young Christians in his region, which he surmises may be linked to their increasing desire to seek emotive experiences.

“Although I see this as largely a positive thing, I am sometimes cautious of how this trend can lead to a less than costly discipleship,” Campbell said. “It’s much easier to chill to a Bethel album than to read the minor prophets or tell your friend about Jesus.”

Mental health concernsCaring for their personal mental health and their communities’ mental well-being was a top priority for Gen Z evangelicals across the eight countries surveyed, ahead of other concerns like adequate job opportunities, climate change, and religious tensions.

In the UK, poor mental health “has reached almost pandemic proportions,” said Sonia Mawhinney, Young Life’s regional director for the UK and Ireland. The lack of professional help available has also placed “a heavy strain on both full-time and volunteer youth leaders to try to help young people in this mental health crisis,” she said.

At present, the ministry is exploring ways to partner with schools, churches, sports clubs, and government agencies across the region to provide support and care for young people.

“The thrust towards self-help and wellness in society at the moment can be confusing for young people,” said Agnew, one of the Northern Ireland–based leaders. He noted that it’s hard for Gen Z believers to figure out where Jesus comes into the picture.

“The challenge is to gently accompany people on their journeys, but also not allow anyone’s own struggles to remove the divine invitation to partner with God [in] what he’s doing in the world,” he said.

relatedBe Quick to Listen, Slow to ‘Therapy Speak’Mia Staub

Building stronger intergenerational relationships is another important factor in addressing the mental health struggles that Gen Z believers face, leaders told CT.

“The silence around the topic of mental health from older generations is creating distance from our next generations,” said Tanita Maddox, Young Life’s associate regional director in Spokane, Washington. “[We ought to] be Jesus weeping at the tomb of Lazarus, even though Jesus knew he would raise Lazarus again.”

In March, Olguin and her team finished work on a manual titled Salud mental en la pastoral universitaria (mental health in campus ministry) that equips leaders working with Gen Zers in Mexico.

The manual, which covers topics like the theology of emotions and burnout syndrome, was created in collaboration with the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students’ (IFES) Logos and Cosmos Initiative. A second edition is currently in progress and is slated to publish next February.

Young Life Mexico, meanwhile, is conducting a study to examine the mental, physical, and emotional health of leaders and kids involved in the ministry, according to its regional director Pratt Butler.

Future impactMore than 4 in 5 (83%) of Gen Z evangelicals believe they can change the world for good.

Gen Zers with a religious affiliation feel more empowered to effect change, the Relate Project found. “Protestant and Orthodox Christians have the strongest sense of agency, while it is lowest in atheists, agnostics, and ‘nones,’” the report noted.

Evangelizing “to as many people around as possible” is how Mathew, the 21-year-old in India, envisions creating a meaningful impact on successive generations. “We are his people who have been ordained to carry out a very specific task—which is to spread his word to others who don’t know about our Lord," she said.

Some leaders, however, think that one’s faith may not necessarily boost one’s level of influence, particularly if faith is merely regarded as a private, personal relationship with God.

“For our young people, action to make the world a better place is fragmented or disconnected from their Christian faith,” said Maddox, the Young Life US associate regional director. “[But] our relationship with God should push us to bring the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth by caring about the things God cares about, and acting on those things.”

This generation is very compassionate, said Mawhinney, the Young Life UK and Ireland director. “Young people are pleasantly astonished when they encounter what the Bible has to say about their passion for justice and creation care,” she said.

“When we teach them the full meta-narrative of Scripture and how God’s redemptive vision includes the necessity for love of neighbor and the world he made, young people are both surprised and inspired to see that their passion is in sync with God’s.”

Additional reporting by Surinder Kaur

The post Gen Z Evangelicals Want to Be Famous for Their Hobbies and Talents appeared first on Christianity Today.

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Nowhere on its website or in its founding documents does the new Global Methodist Church call itself evangelical.

Perhaps the term is too controversial, too divisive and political.

Or perhaps the Methodists are just out of practice.

“You know, as Methodists, it’s okay to say we’re born again,” said Asbury Theological Seminary professor Luther Oconer, preaching to the more than 900 people gathered in San José, Costa Rica, last week for the denomination’s first General Conference.

“Tell the person next to you, ‘I’m born again.’”

Around 900 people turned and said, “I’m born again,” laughing at themselves as they did.

The convening General Conference looked and sounded evangelical, with charismatic tinges. There was talk about evangelism, missions, the Great Commission, discipleship, and revival. People spoke unselfconsciously about the presence of the Holy Spirit, words from the Lord, what God is doing among them right now, and their love for Jesus. They read aloud from Scripture, taking the words as personal promises. Delegates raised their hands, singing “Oceans” and other contemporary worship songs, and lifted their voices with camp-meeting fervor when the band struck up “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.”

relatedAre the Global Methodists Evangelical?Daniel Silliman

Oconer, who is originally from the Philippines and described himself as a third-generation Global South minister, ended his sermon with an altar call. He asked people to come forward to give themselves and their new denomination to Christ, committing to the biblical vision of a New Testament church.

“Let us be a church of Pentecost first,” he said. “We must be a church of Pentecost first. We are a people born of the Spirit, first and foremost.”

People streamed forward, kneeling, praying, crying, singing. Steve Beard, editor in chief of Good News, described this as “old-time Methodism,” a religious movement unconcerned with the propriety of mid-century mainline Protestantism, a movement of field preaching, circuit riders, conversion experiences, and testimonies about freedom from sin.

In the midst of resurgent evangelicalism, however, some Global Methodists are worried about preserving Wesleyan distinctives. They expressed concern that the denomination might slide into a kind of generic evangelicalism.

The religious landscape is increasingly dominated, after all, by nondenominational churches that reject the importance of distinctives. Even churches that have affiliations often downplay their differences. Many evangelical churches feel about the same, whether they’re Southern Baptist or Evangelical Free, Independent Christian or Christian and Missionary Alliance. They sing the same songs, talk about the same Christian celebrities, listen to similar sermons, and practice mostly indistinguishable liturgies.

Roughly half the congregations that left the United Methodist Church have not joined the Global Methodists. Some are waiting to see what happens. They have said they might join, depending on the shape the new denomination takes, its authority structure, and the guarantees put in place to prevent the repetition of their bad experiences. But others are just done with denominations—liberal or conservative, mainline or evangelical. Hanging on to Methodist connections isn’t that important to them.

Mark Tooley, president of The Institute on Religion and Democracy and a lifelong Methodist, said the new denomination is going “against the headwinds of current American religious preferences.” As they embrace an evangelical style, Global Methodists will be forced to answer the question, “Why should Christians be specifically Wesleyan?”

In Costa Rica—as delegates passed a constitution, established the process for nominating bishops, and dealt with the legislative business of founding a new denomination—they also worked informally to articulate a Wesleyan charism, the unique spiritual gift that the Global Methodists could offer to evangelicals and the whole church.

“I think what we have to offer as a movement is the ‘heart strangely warmed,’ which is hearts changed, sanctification,” said Emily Allen, an Asbury seminary student and a delegate to the General Conference. “There’s a line I love from the Methodist communion liturgy: freed for joyful obedience. That is such a joyful thing! We need to have our hearts transformed.”

Jeff Kelly, pastor of the largest Global Methodist church in Nebraska, said he sensed the Holy Spirit changing hearts during the legislative sessions in Costa Rica.

“I’m seeing an injection of grace—that Wesleyan gift of grace,” he said.

It made him think that the new denomination might put an emphasis on the doctrine of sanctification, Kelly said. That idea could be reclaimed as the key Wesleyan distinctive.

“I think John Wesley called it the Methodist depositum,” he said. “After you’re saved, you’re not done. God is still bringing change.”

Seedbed, a publisher specializing in Wesleyan literature, currently lists two books on sanctification among its best-selling titles.

The publisher also released a hymnal specifically for the convening General Conference. Editor Sterling Allen, a Global Methodist minister at a church in Houston, called it “a curated renewal of Charles Wesley’s most beloved hymns” that he hoped would serve as “a catalyst for repentance and renewal, a celebration of the joyous proclamation of the gospel, and an outpouring of the Spirit.” It includes 58 hymns on sanctifying grace, including “Spirit of Faith, Come Down,” “What is Our Calling’s Glorious Hope,” “Lord, Fill Me with a Humble Fear,” and “O Joyful Sound of Gospel Grace!”

Seedbed is also reprinting Methodist texts as pocket-sized tracts. One is John Wesley’s On Perfection. Another is The Character of a Methodist, where the founder of the movement writes that “Methodists are continually offering their whole selves to God … holding back nothing but giving all to increase the glory of God in the world.”

On the final day of the General Convention, the Global Methodists voted to change their mission statement to put more of an emphasis on sanctification. The original mission statement, put in place by transitional leadership, said the church’s goal was “to make disciples of Jesus Christ who worship passionately, love extravagantly, and witness boldly.”

David Watson, New Testament professor at United Theological Seminary and lead editor at Firebrand, said it seemed too generic to him. That mission statement would work for any evangelical megachurch—but wasn’t specifically Wesleyan.

With input from Paul Lawlor, a pastor in Memphis, and Jason E. Vickers, a professor at George W. Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor, Watson proposed an alternative. The new mission statement said, “The Global Methodist Church exists to make disciples of Jesus Christ and spread scriptural holiness across the globe.”

It passed overwhelmingly.

“What I’ve tried to do is keep us theologically grounded so we don’t lapse into mere pragmatism but stay Methodist,” Watson said. “What’s at stake is our identity as Methodists. … For us, the heart of it all is sanctification.”

Global Methodists Find Joy in Costa RicaDaniel Silliman in San José, Costa Rica

‘Wesley Is Fire Now’ and Evangelicals Are Being Strangely WarmedClayton Sidenbender

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In 1983, biblical scholar Robert Gundry was ousted from the Evangelical Theological Society.

Gundry, in his lengthy commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, had suggested that Matthew tailored stories about Jesus to his specific audience, sometimes in nonhistorical ways. Theologian Norman Geisler, who spearheaded the ouster, believed this “undermine[d] confidence in the complete truthfulness of all of Scripture.” Gundry disagreed with this assessment—he affirmed the doctrine of biblical inerrancy and argued the authors of Scripture were using accepted literary standards of their day. But he was expelled nonetheless.

Thirty years later, New Testament scholar Michael Licona found himself embroiled in a similar controversy. Licona had questioned the literal historicity of Matthew’s reference to saints rising from the grave after Jesus’ resurrection (Matt. 27:52–53). Here, too, Geisler led a campaign against the perceived threat to biblical inerrancy. As a result, Licona voluntarily resigned from Southern Evangelical Seminary and left his position at the North American Mission Board. (Today, he teaches at Houston Christian University.)

The doctrine of inerrancy may be a historically recent development, but some consider it essential to the faith. In fact, Geisler believed the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture was “the foundation of all other doctrines.”

But what happens when cracks appear in that foundation? I can tell you: It’s unsettling.

During my transition from high school to college, I deconstructed the Catholic faith of my upbringing but eventually reaffirmed my belief in God and converted to Protestantism. One of the foundational building blocks of my reconstructed faith was the authority of Scripture—including my idea of inerrancy.

But then that idea was contested. Though Christians have been dealing with the topic of biblical contradictions since there was a Bible, I started earlier this year. My exposure to contradictions occurred on TikTok, where I found clips (like this one) of critical biblical scholars challenging my beliefs about what the Bible is and how it works. I learned about the two different lists of animals on the ark (Gen. 6:19–20 and 7:2–3), the potential discrepancy between 1 Chronicles and 1 Samuel about who killed Goliath, and the differing genealogies of Jesus Christ. In my high school apologetics class, I was taught that there are only apparent contradictions in the Bible, not real ones. But what if there actually are real ones?

Licona takes up this question as it relates to the Gospels in his new book, Jesus, Contradicted: Why the Gospels Tell the Same Story Differently—a shorter and more accessible version of his 2016 academic book, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? From the beginning, he’s clear where the problem lies: “Contradictions offer a challenge to the historical reliability of the Gospels and to some versions of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.” Yet he argues that they “do not necessarily call into question the truth of the Christian faith.”

The rules of ancient biographyThe most skeptical position on inerrancy, as advanced by New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, treats contradictions between Gospel accounts as a reason for doubting their accuracy altogether. If the authors can’t get the minor details right, why trust them at all?

On the flip side, attempts at harmonizing the Gospels have been a popular (though not unanimous) Christian response. While some harmonizations may be legitimate, others seem far-fetched (like Peter denying Jesus six times, not three) and risk “subjecting the Gospel texts to a sort of hermeneutical waterboarding until they tell the exegete what he or she wants to hear,” as Licona put it in his 2016 book. Harmonization in the wrong place may very well lead us astray—and damage our credibility.

Why Don’t the Gospel Writers Tell the Same Story?Interview by Caleb Lindgren

A third camp sees Gospel differences as grounds for rejecting the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture. This was my initial reaction as I wrestled with the biblical scholarship. The Bible, I believed, was the very Word of God, his speech in written form. But if God cannot err and the Bible has errors, then how could the Bible be divinely inspired at all? I began to think this collection of books by human authors might be just that: human.

Worse, the doubts spread. If what I had been told about the Bible was untrue, what else about Christianity was untrue? My conception of inerrancy and inspiration put my faith on shaky ground. But Licona lays out an alternative to this inflexible view of the Bible, hopefully preventing a good many Christians from falling away when they encounter contradictions too.

According to Licona, there’s a better way to handle Gospel differences, and it starts with understanding why they’re there in the first place. Licona provides a plausible explanation: Most of the differences between Gospels are due to literary conventions common to the genre of Greco-Roman (or “ancient”) biography and thus are not really contradictions or errors at all.

Importantly, ancient biography is not modern biography. Ancient biographies are playing by different rules and have different purposes. “Ancient biographers,” Licona explains, “sought to narrate sayings and deeds of the biographee that illuminated his character.” They’re portraits, not legal transcripts. The “essence” and “life” of a person are what matter, not precise details. Therefore, “Imposing modern expectations on ancient texts and authors is anachronistic since it assumes a standard not aligned with their objectives.” In ancient historiography, facts can be “reported with some elasticity.”

Matthew’s genealogy is a case in point. Luke and Matthew both contain genealogies for Jesus, but they don’t match. A popular explanation (though, as Licona points out, not among scholars) is that Matthew’s genealogy applies to Mary while Luke’s applies to Joseph. However, Matthew’s math suggests this is the wrong approach.

Despite claiming to include all the generations from Abraham to Jesus, Matthew omits multiple generations and uses “Jeconiah” twice (1:11–12). Why? He may be using a rhetorical device called “gematria,” where numbers are assigned to letters in the alphabet. In the Hebrew alphabet, the letters in “David” yield the number 14. By listing three sets of 14 generations, Licona argues, “Matthew appears to have arranged his genealogy artistically in order to communicate to his Jewish readers that Jesus is the Son of David, the Messiah.”

Understanding the rules of the game is essential to understanding what’s going on in the Gospels. Licona draws from ancient Roman compositional textbooks and Plutarch’s Lives to demonstrate six rules (or “compositional devices”) common to the genre:

• Compression: presenting an event as occurring over a shorter time frame than its actual duration.
• Displacement: removing an event from its original context and placing it in a different one.
• Transferal: taking an action done by (or to) one person and attributing it to someone else.
• Conflation: combining elements of two or more events but narrating them as one.
• Simplification: omitting or altering details to abbreviate a story.
• Literary spotlighting: only mentioning the person(s) in focus while being aware of others present.

When read in light of these compositional devices, many of the apparent contradictions between the Gospels disappear. Take the story about Jesus raising Jairus’s daughter from the dead: Is she about to die (as in Mark and Luke) or has she already died (as in Matthew)? While those with a preference for harmonization might posit that Jairus said both, this is more likely an example of Matthew compressing a story, as is his tendency.

For instance, in the story of Jesus healing the centurion’s servant, Luke records the centurion sending emissaries on his behalf (7:1–10), while Matthew cuts out the middlemen and has the centurion go himself (8:5–13). Likewise, Matthew compresses Mark’s account of the events following the triumphal entry (compare Mark 11:1–23 and Matt. 21:1–21). In Matthew’s version, Jesus appears at the temple once rather than twice, and the fig tree he curses withers immediately, not on the next day.

We find other examples of compositional devices at play in the Resurrection narratives. The Gospels differ in recording the number of women who visited the tomb, the number of angels at the tomb, and the number of male disciples who visited the tomb afterward. Are these errors, or merely examples of literary spotlighting?

The human elementWhile compositional devices clear up apparent contradictions and “errors”—calming concerns that differences between the Gospels undermine their historical reliability—they also raise issues for how we understand Scripture. They introduce a distinctly human element. The Gospel authors use sources. They paraphrase. They modify words and actions, even those of Jesus. Matthew and Luke improve upon Mark’s grammar, and Luke exhibits “editorial fatigue” (where he changes a story, but leaves leftover portions from the original, as with the parable of the talents).

Patterns like these flatly contradict the “divine dictation” view of inspiration—that the evangelists were heavenly stenographers taking down every word they received from the Holy Spirit. And though most evangelical Christians who affirm the inspiration and total inerrancy of Scripture would deny “divine dictation,” this model remains influential.

One Easy Trick to See If You’re Reading the Bible RightAdam Stevenson

For example, the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy states that “the whole of Scripture and all its parts, down to the very words of the original, were given by divine inspiration” (emphasis added). The glaring question is “How?” While the authors concede, “The mode of divine inspiration remains largely a mystery to us,” their view of inerrancy implies a very small role for the human authors themselves.

There’s a danger in holding such a rigid view of inerrancy. If you cannot square what you believe about Scripture with what you read in Scripture, something has to give. And if you put this view of Scripture at the foundation of all your beliefs—as Geisler recommended—then the whole edifice might come tumbling down.

Licona calls his alternative “flexible inerrancy.” Under this view, “the Bible is true, trustworthy, authoritative, and without error in all that it teaches” (emphasis added). Whereas traditional inerrancy says the Bible cannot err in any way, including in the details, flexible inerrancy says the message of God is preserved despite human involvement in the composition and preservation of the biblical texts.

How is Scripture divinely inspired then? Licona proposes a theory:

God, having foreknown all possible worlds, chose to actualize the one in which the biblical authors would write what they did. On some occasions, God may have planted ideas, concepts, perhaps even the very words they would write. However, the human element is present throughout and includes imperfections.

This view isn’t entirely original. In 1999, Christian philosopher William Lane Craig argued that God orchestrated the circumstances whereby the biblical authors would write what they did, and in that sense guided the process. Similarly, Reformed theologian B. B. Warfield thought inspiration looked like “[bringing] the right men to the right places at the right times, with the right endowments, impulses, acquirements, to write just the books which were designed for them.”

The Bible doesn’t spell out how inspiration works, and we can only speculate, but such statements at least don’t contradict Scripture. For example, Licona conducts a word study of theopneustos (the word for “inspired” or “God-breathed” found in 2 Timothy 3:16) and finds, “Perhaps the closest way of describing the meaning of theopneustos is to say the thing it describes derives from God or that God is its ultimate and special origin.”

Due to the Bible’s ambiguity regarding inspiration and inerrancy, we ought not demand conformity to the most rigid conceptions of either. There should be room to question. And we should remember that there were followers of Jesus before there was a New Testament. If believing in traditional inerrancy is a litmus test for being a Christian, then Jesus’ disciples wouldn’t pass. Nor would Paul, or any members of the early church.

The Gospels as we have them accomplish what their authors intended. Though they may supply tinted windows into Jesus’ life and teachings, what we see is true and compelling. They show us who Jesus is, what he was like, and what he taught. They establish his authority and the beauty of his way of life.

If the words and deeds of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels had contradicted the living memory of Jesus, it’s unlikely they would have found such broad acceptance across the early churches. They were preserved because they taught readers how to be disciples—and they can do the same for us today, no matter our view of inerrancy.

Noah M. Peterson is a philosophy of religion graduate student at the University of Birmingham and the editor of a think tank based in Washington, DC.

The post The Bible Contains Discrepancies. That Doesn’t Make It Untrustworthy. appeared first on Christianity Today.

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Devastating hundreds of miles from the Florida Gulf Coast to Georgia to the mountains of North Carolina, Hurricane Helene has created a complicated equation for Christian organizations that are on the frontline of disaster response.

“In my more than 20 years of disaster experience, I can’t think of a time when such a large area was at risk,” Jeff Jellets, the disaster coordinator for The Salvation Army’s work in the South, said in a statement.

Samaritan’s Purse chief operating officer Edward Graham told CT that the organization had to call in equipment and volunteers from its Canadian arm for its hurricane response and even had to adjust some of its overseas work. Just for this disaster, Samaritan’s Purse is operating in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina.

“We’re running at max capacity for our domestic response,” Graham said. But he added, “Logistically, God has given us the resources and the talent to navigate.”

Still, Christian relief organizations—partnered with local churches—were working on bringing help to the most difficult-to-reach places. In western North Carolina, where record-setting flooding destroyed roads and other infrastructure, mountain communities, including the city of Asheville, were difficult to access.

On Monday, Samaritan’s Purse was setting up an emergency field hospital in North Carolina’s Avery County, a rural area in the Appalachians where search and rescue teams were conducting operations in mountain towns and remote valleys.

The field hospital will function as an emergency room alongside the local hospital in anticipation of an influx of patients from rescue operations. More than 100 have died in the storm.

Graham also said a Samaritan’s Purse helicopter dropped food and water to stranded students at Lees McRae College in the mountains of North Carolina. He said he alerted the North Carolina National Guard that the school would need Chinook helicopter evacuations, and the military airlifted students out on Sunday.

The disaster had engulfed Samaritan’s Purse’s own headquarters in Boone, North Carolina, and its staff were reeling from losing homes in the storm.

The disaster also hit personally for the Graham family in Montreat, North Carolina, where evangelist Billy Graham raised his children. Edward Graham, Billy Graham’s grandson, serves on the board of Montreat College, a Christian college in the same area which also suffered significant damage. Graham said he didn’t know the state of the family home, but he couldn’t give that his attention: “My grandfather lives in heaven.”

“It’s not that there is a lack of supplies and desire to help,” said Amanda Held Opelt, an author and songwriter who worked for Samaritan’s Purse for a decade. She lives in a rural area near Boone called Meat Camp and has family in the surrounding Appalachian hollers.

The only road into Meat Camp is gone, and Opelt knows a pregnant woman who is due soon and stranded. “What we need is a thousand engineers with bridge-building capabilities to get here,” she said.

Graham noted that flooding in a flat plain is one thing, but they were seeing “the power of water in a valley.”

Opelt noted the resilience of people in Appalachia and the small local churches there, cut off from the world but checking on each other and bringing water for the sick and elderly. She was able to navigate into the small Appalachian community of Bakersville, North Carolina to check on her two aunts.

“They were sitting there eating saltines and vegetables from their garden and washing their bloomers in the creek,” she said. “I started crying when I saw them.”

The most extensive death and destruction is in North Carolina, but communities in Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida are also dealing with destroyed homes and infrastructure.

After the storm, some churches in heavily hit areas met outside to worship on Sunday, locals reported. But some church members and leaders couldn’t communicate with each other at all because of compromised cell service. And others focused on distributing water and food from their properties, which became natural community gathering points.

The Salvation Army quickly deployed 14 mobile units to provide thousands of meals in Florida and Georgia.

Send Relief, the disaster response arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, has 23 response sites set up in six states to respond to Helene, providing food and organizing debris removal and hot showers.

Convoy of Hope, a faith-based disaster response organization that partners with local churches, arrived with supplies in Perry, Florida, on Sunday. Three hurricanes have hit Perry in the last year. The organization was sending supplies on Monday to Morganton, North Carolina; Tampa Bay, Florida; and Augusta, Georgia.

Local organizations and churches have gotten to work as well. Baptist churches in western North Carolina were distributing water, the biggest need in the area.

Evangelical climate scientists warn that local churches and relief organizations will have to adjust to a new normal of these types of super-charged weather events in unexpected places.

Jessica Moerman is a climate scientist and the CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Network. She’s also from Knoxville, Tennessee, near the areas devastated. Her family members lost a home in the 2016 wildfire in nearby Gatlinburg.

“What we’ve seen over the last few years is that we’re just in a new normal,” she said. “We’re seeing it across the Southeast and across Appalachia—small towns saying, ‘This is like nothing we’ve seen before.’”

Moerman explained how seawater warming due to climate change made these storms worse. With Helene, warmer gulf waters meant the storm held more water in the atmosphere and had the strength to go further inland and dump historic rain on western North Carolina—a place so far inland that few would expect it to be vulnerable to hurricanes.

The warm seawater is “rocket fuel that makes these storms stronger and more intense,” she said. “The hurricane has so much more energy, it can travel farther … It’s really, really heartbreaking.”

Christian disaster relief organizations will have to prepare for a situation “where we are expecting worse storms than we’ve ever experienced in the past and expecting to experience them again.”

Organizations responding now are focused on people are still missing from the storm, and staff noted that first responders in these areas are still having issues with communication and are battling their own fatigue.

Graham said Samaritan’s Purse would stay in the disaster areas for the duration.

“This is going to be a very long recovery,” he said. “We do not leave the community till it’s done.”

The post Widespread Helene Misery Stretches Christian Relief Groups appeared first on Christianity Today.

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The high season of American politics is here. Stomachs are knotted. Electoral trend lines undulate. Betting markets tremble.

And what of the American church? Many of us are trembling too: with fear, with rage, with anticipation of whatever may be in store for us in Washington—and in our own kitchens and sanctuaries.

A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine here at CT wrote an article pertaining to politics, and the online backlash was furious. The social media responses crossed every prudential line in Proverbs; they would have made Martin Luther blush.

And it didn’t come from social media bots, machines programmed to automate inhumanity. The names of many respondents were familiar. They weren’t computers; they were Christians. It was us.

When I say “us,” I don’t mean that you are personally sniping on social media; I know I’m not. Rather, I mean that the precepts I offer below are not—cannot be, if they’re of any use—reflections and guidance loftily directed at those people, the Christians who embarrass and frustrate and confound us.

The way we get through this next month and the months to come with any semblance of Christian love and unity is to copy Paul in 1 Timothy: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst” (1:15). And not just to say it, but to mean it.

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To that end, here are 25 precepts for an election year:

1. A Christian’s opposition to Candidate X does not entail her support for Candidate Y. It does not entail it by implication or in practice. To insist otherwise against the protests of your sibling in Christ is to embrace dissension and slander.
2. You can critique a fellow Christian’s politics without questioning his faith, and both of you should be able to hear the difference.
3. Your critique of a fellow Christian’s politics may well include reminding her of the commitments and obligations of her faith.
4. Your critique of a fellow Christian’s politics may never persuade him. At a political impasse with a sibling in Christ, mutual forbearance and grace is usually a better way forward than ongoing argument. What better things could you each be doing with your time?
5. There is a line across which a Christian’s politics might justifiably cast doubt on her profession of faith. The line may not be where we assume it to be.
6. That line may even be different for different Christians in different times, places, and stages of sanctification, for God does not address our every sin, error, and weakness at once.
7. Some of us may need more courage of our convictions, especially if we find ourselves a religious, political, or cultural minority in our churches and wider communities.
8. But most of us, in this brash and hasty culture, are more likely to need forbearance and grace for those we believe to be less spiritual, moral, intelligent, or knowledgeable than ourselves.
9. Forbearance isn’t tolerance. Grace is not condescension.
10. Nor are forbearance and grace indecision and cowardice.
11. Remember 1 John 4:20: “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar.”
12. Lasting political disagreement among Christians is not by itself evidence of sin, unbelief, or any other dysfunction. Reasonable, faithful Christians may in good faith reach different conclusions. They may all have solid biblical support for their views; they may all seek the common good; they may all seek to love their neighbors; they may always disagree.
13. Your voting choices are constrained by the realities of our electoral system. You can vote third party or write in a name, but don’t pretend these are politically viable candidates when they are not.
14. Reasonable, faithful Christians may decide to only seriously consider viable candidates.
15. Reasonable, faithful Christians may decide that viability is less important than ethical and policy alignment.
16. Reasonable, faithful Christians may decide not to vote: “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help” (Psalm 146:3, KJV).
17. Hope is a Christian virtue; wishful thinking is not.
18. Wisdom is a Christian calling; cynicism is not wise.
19. No candidate is owed your vote. Not even if you believe you have a duty to vote. Not even if you’re registered to one party or another. Not even if you live in a swing state.
20. With some exceptions, down-ballot votes—especially for state and local officials, judges, and ballot initiatives—will have more frequent and more tangible effects on your life and those of your neighbors than votes for president.
21. This is probably not the most important election of your lifetime. If it is the most important election of your lifetime, you can’t know that in real time. You may be able to make that assessment 5 or 10 or 20 years hence, but you cannot know now.
22. Your vote is not passed along to the candidates with an explanatory note. The candidates do not know you felt conflicted or were strategically voting to change the direction of the opposing party. They only know they have won with the support of however many thousands or millions of Americans, and they will act in those voters’ name—that is, in your name.
23. What you do in the privacy of the voting booth is your own business and may be kept secret. But if you find yourself hesitant or ashamed to share how you voted, ask yourself why.
24. All told, your individual vote is of negligible import in determining the electoral outcome or the future of the country. It may be of substantial spiritual import for you.
25. “Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–9).

Bonnie Kristian is the editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today.

The post 25 Precepts for This (and Every) Election appeared first on Christianity Today.

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The Lausanne Movement’s decision to release a 97-point, 13,000-word theological statement on the inaugural day of its fourth world congress has sparked a week of debate and conversation.

The seven-part treatise, which stated theological positions on the gospel, the Bible, the church, the “human person,” discipleship, the “family of nations,” and technology, went live online shortly before the event kicked off on Sunday night.

The Seoul Statement “was designed to fill in some gaps, to be a supplement in seven key topics that we have not thought enough about or haven’t reflected or written enough about within the Lausanne Movement,” said David Bennett, Lausanne’s global associate director, on Sunday afternoon, where he met with the media to explain the statement’s vision and purpose.

“We were not trying to create a fourth document which would then replace or make obsolete those earlier three documents,” he added.

The congress organizers also explained at a press conference on Monday that the text was final.

Nevertheless, two days later, Christian Daily International reported that a section addressing homosexuality had been amended after its release. These edits were intended to be made prior to the Seoul Statement’s publication, a Lausanne spokesperson said on Tuesday.

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On Thursday, in response to the statement’s release, Ed Stetzer, Lausanne’s regional director for North America, publicly urged the organization to “state emphatically that evangelism is ‘central,’ ‘a priority,’ and ‘indispensable’ to our mission.” Meanwhile, by Friday morning, 235 delegates had signed an open letter organized by Korean Evangelicals Embracing Integral Mission asking the Lausanne Theology Working Group (LTWG), the body that composed the Seoul Statement, to review and revise it with special attention to 10 particular points.

Through Thursday night, no Lausanne leaders had offered an in-depth explanation from the main stage of the Seoul Statement, or of why the statement was finalized prior to the conference—an action that surprised those who, based on previous congresses, had anticipated a document still open to revision based on delegates’ feedback.

On Friday morning, Mike du Toit, Lausanne’s director of communications and content, sent a mass email to delegates, explaining that the Seoul Statement “focuses on certain theological topics identified by the Lausanne Theology Working Group as needing greater attention by the global church, and reflects on them on the basis of the gospel, the biblical story we live and tell.”

“We recognize that in introducing the Seoul Statement, we should have been clearer in explaining its purpose and the way in which participants are invited to engage with it,” he wrote. The email also offered a link to a feedback form.

Du Toit’s email also noted that delegates would be invited to sign a document called the Collaborative Action Commitment during Saturday’s closing session and that this was not related to the Seoul Statement.

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Later that morning, Wheaton College president and plenary speaker Philip Ryken mentioned the Seoul Statement and encouraged delegates to provide feedback.

In the meantime, CT heard from dozens of delegates who were confused and frustrated by the lack of formal feedback channels and whose understanding of the purpose of the statement diverged from that presented by Bennett in his Sunday and Monday press conferences.

The process leading to the Seoul Statement began at the end of 2022 when the Lausanne board tapped Sri Lanka’s Ivor Poobalan, principal of Colombo Theological Seminary, and Zimbabwe’s Victor Nakah, international director for sub-Saharan Africa with Mission to the World, as co-chairs of a drafting committee. Poobalan and Nakah worked with 33 theologians from South Africa, India, Ethiopia, Norway, Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Iran, Palestine, Sweden, Singapore, and Zambia.

“We’re not surprised by the conversations that have been generated,” said Nakah. “It’s a theological document, after all, and the topics in this statement are real issues.”

Poobalan and Nakah met with global managing editor Morgan Lee to discuss the Seoul Statement on Thursday afternoon.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How was the task of the Seoul Statement articulated?

Poobalan: We asked ourselves, do we need another statement? There was no need for us to write a document simply because the Congress should produce a document. Our existing Lausanne documents are great in themselves.

But Lausanne leadership felt that as global Christianity grows in new places, a new generation of Christians was not aware of the Lausanne Covenant, Cape Town Commitment, or Manila Manifesto and perhaps not very interested in going back there. Instead, they are concerned about current issues.

For instance, anthropology has become a big issue only in the 21st century, and in the last few years it has become even bigger. So it was important for us to speak to some of these issues. We are not replacing the previous documents, but we’re trying to find ways to add more value to what Lausanne stands for, providing some specific guidelines that will help the global church navigate tough issues.

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What was the process of creating the statement?

Poobalan: Throughout these 50 years, we’ve talked about the authority, infallibility, and usefulness of Scripture, but we haven’t really addressed how to interpret it. Our purpose was to address issues that have been somewhat neglected or under duress, such as the major challenge of discipleship or the issue of what it means to be human. That’s how we arrived at these seven subjects, though many others could have been addressed.

Nakah: For those who wonder why we started with the gospel again, it’s because there are now many different “gospels” going around. If evangelicals don’t have some agreed way of reading, studying, and interpreting Scripture, how are we going to find answers to the issues facing the church today? If hermeneutics is not attended to, then it’s just the gospel according to Ivor or Victor.

Why was the statement finalized before the Congress?

Poobalan: Different approaches are possible. The Lausanne Covenant was finalized during the Congress. In Cape Town, there was no final document at the end of the Congress; it came out much later, but listening took place in Cape Town and then the team used that information to complete the document later.

We took the position that we could complete this document, present it at the Congress, and get a sense of the chatter. We haven’t decided what we will do as a result, but we will discuss the input together as Lausanne leadership and see how we will go from there.

Nakah: The way people have responded to the document gives a more accurate picture of the global evangelical world’s theological diversity. But all this conversation being generated is good feedback.

Rightly or wrongly, the document was not meant to be something we present, get feedback on, and then refine. If that is what we wanted, we would have done that. That’s why this feedback is warranted. You don’t present a theological document and have everybody celebrating.

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I’ve heard criticism over the lack of formal feedback channels. This hasn’t stopped some delegates from giving feedback. But if this feedback then influences any changes, I can imagine other delegates feeling frustrated that there wasn’t a more formal way of communicating their opinions.

Poobalan: I think that tomorrow [September 27], this will be addressed, and I do think people will be afforded opportunities to give feedback. Of course, feedback was going to come anyway, and once you formalize it, then there’s an expectation as to what you’re going to do with the feedback, and that’s what the Lausanne board will wrestle with.

Nakah: We are very grateful to the board for accepting this document and then taking it from there. But ultimately, it is Lausanne’s document. It needs the movement’s leadership to explain guidelines of how to move forward.

There are probably no other theological statements out there whose process was led by theologians from Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka. How might your background and context have influenced this statement?

Poobalan: I was surprised when Victor and I were asked to co-chair the TWG, because this group plays a critical role and has always had leaders from the Western world. The board’s bold willingness to think differently and invite two co-chairs from the Global South was surprising, but also stimulating and encouraging. On the other hand, we wanted to ensure that the document didn’t just become a matter of the Global South.

To that end, in establishing our team, we looked for people who could represent different parts of the church. Many of these 33 theologians are very well-known, but they were an amazing group who collaborated with each other.

In every meeting with them, I had two feelings: a sense of the great expertise in the room, and sheer humility.

Nakah: There were other times in this process when we realized we needed expertise. On more than one occasion, we would realize that someone was missing, and we had to reach out to someone who had done research in that area, because we knew we were not the experts. We ended up working with people who are far smarter than us and far more clever than us. It was a joy.

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Can you point to one or two sections of the Seoul Statement that really evidence the presence of the Global South in this document?

Nakah: As we know, Africa has become the breeding ground of the prosperity gospel. In light of that, the section on the gospel was important, because there is a sense in which we can talk about many gospels on the continent of Africa. We wanted to frame the document in such a way that anyone who reads it will leave with an understanding of the gospel that is refreshing and challenging.

The second great challenge for the Majority World church today is discipleship. Some African theologians still push back when the church in Africa is described as one mile wide and one inch deep. But that’s still the reality.

So if there’s one section that is most critical for the African church going forward, it’s this one. We hope it will challenge church and parachurch leaders to take discipleship seriously.

Poobalan: This document speaks to the issue of theological anthropology. In the church, there is a sense of confusion about what it means to be a redeemed human being. Some people have at times claimed a godlike status or a power beyond what the Bible offers to the redeemed human person.

But also in the area of gender and sexuality, at times the Global South has wondered, “Why is Christianity speaking only from the perspective of the Global North?” In that sense, talking about sexuality and gender was important to clarify that our convictions are not reactions to what’s happening in the West, but expressions of the scriptural position.

Consequently, there’s a whole section on what Scripture teaches about sexuality and gender. There’s a little more Bible exposition there, because of the global church’s need for clarity about what Scripture teaches.

Additionally, the “family of nations” section talks about the importance of peace and what it means to be a nation in both a biblical and modern sense. For instance, can we just equate the historic names of people and countries without context? [Editor’s note: See Section 84 of the Seoul Statement.] We are trying to address current situations in which Christians sometimes find a theological basis for particular positions when taking an approach to war or conflict.

And yet sometimes there are contradictions in our approach. Christians may sometimes denounce all violence against civilians, but at other times they may find theological reasons to justify it.

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I’m aware that some Lausanne delegates, because of their home context and those they minister to, found the sections on LGBT issues either too soft or too harsh.

Nakah: For the group that worked on this section, we felt that hermeneutics was a good starting point. So we started by asking, “What does the Bible teach?” In our group, there was general consensus as to what the Bible said, and the disagreements were all about application to real-life contexts.

For those leaders who feel our approach was a little bit soft, I would ask: Is it biblical to insult gays and lesbians? If you come back to Scripture, the Bible helps you understand that God loves sinners. That’s totally different from a cultural position that demeans them.

How did you choose which conflicts to mention by name in the “family of nations” section?

Poobalan: We recognized that not every conflict could not be mentioned, because that was not the point. Some conflicts have been dealt with to the extent that the country has moved on, like South Africa or Sri Lanka or Northern Ireland. The examples of current conflicts serve as points of reference to discuss the biblical position on conflict and where Christians should stand. We do understand when people feel sensitive and sad that a particular conflict they have experienced is not mentioned.

With regard to Gaza and Israel, this situation is unique because the church is very strongly divided, based on its theology of Israel.

In a way, we would like to see the global church put this issue right in the middle and say, “Let’s talk about this. What is the actual biblical theology of Israel? How does this square with our understanding of the church” (which we have discussed in the third chapter of the statement)? It is important to discuss the particulars of the Seoul Statement, but we would really like the church to get back to asking, “Where does our theological basis come from?”

We hope very much that this work will stimulate the church to engage in conversation. This is not going to be easy, because at the moment a lot of emotion is involved, but we hope that the church will take up this task, since it is painful for the church to be polarized on this issue based on theology.

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If I’m a delegate reading the Seoul Statement and I agree with much of it but not all of it, should I still feel that I can be part of the Lausanne Movement?

Nakah: I go back to the question of what unites evangelicals. What are the non-negotiable fundamentals or essentials of the Christian faith?

When it comes to topical issues, most evangelicals don’t quite understand the overwhelming diversity of the global evangelical body. If anyone decides whether they are in or out of the Lausanne Movement on the basis of this statement, that’s unfortunate.

Poobalan: It’s naive to think that all evangelicals, even in one country, will agree on everything. But we practice this discipline of friendship, recognizing that the essentials of the faith must not be compromised.

Even John Stott and Billy Graham, the founders of the Lausanne Movement, disagreed on certain aspects, but they could remain friends. They reached out to each other. Similarly, in this Congress, our idea of collaboration is not based on all of us thinking identically. Collaboration involves a willingness to stretch out our hand to others who hold to the same core convictions.

What do you want people to know about the way this statement discusses evangelism?

Poobalan: The statement is very clear that evangelism is absolutely important. We’re working away from old dichotomies that separate the message we proclaim from the lives we live. Throughout the statement, there are many references to the importance of verbal proclamation, but verbal proclamation by people who do not demonstrate the reality of what they proclaim will ultimately undermine the truth of the message.

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Pornography use has continued to climb over the past decade, especially among young people who are exposed to explicit images earlier than ever. Yet most Americans today don’t see porn as a bad thing for society, and many Christians say they aren’t worried about its effects.

That’s according to a new report released this week from Barna and Pure Desire, a ministry for people with pornography addictions.

Researchers found that 61 percent of Americans say they view porn at least occasionally, up from 55 percent in Barna’s 2015 survey on the topic. More women are viewing porn than in the past (44% versus 39% nine years ago).

In the church, pastors are now more likely report a personal history of porn use (67% versus 57% nine years ago). Nearly 1 in 5 pastors say they currently struggle with porn. And among Christians who have attended services within the last month, more than half say they view pornography at least occasionally.

“Porn consumption is no longer confined to a specific demographic or subculture,” the report said. “It touches all segments of society (from young to old) with no regard to gender, social status or religious beliefs.”

The new data aligns with other research showing dramatic increases in the amount of online porn created and consumed over the last several years.

One recent study suggested 2.5 million people view online pornography every minute, and online porn consumption has increased by 91 percent since 2000. The increased availability, the ease of access to pornography on the internet, and even the social isolation exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns are seen as major factors contributing to the uptick.

Some faith-based efforts to curb the growth of the online porn industry have advocated for legal restrictions, including a push for age-verification laws and stricter regulations on tech-device creators. Other ministries have focused on helping individuals overcome pornography habits.

Leaders from Barna and Pure Desire said they hope their research highlights the pervasiveness of pornography and encourages more pastors and church staff to prioritize support for those struggling. But the stats may reveal an even bigger hurdle: Many people, including Christians, don’t see any problem with it.

“Over three in five Christians (62%) tell Barna they agree a person can regularly view pornography and live a sexually healthy life,” the report reads. That’s only four percentage points behind the share of all US adults (66%) who don’t consider viewing pornography harmful.

Moreover, 49 percent of practicing Christians who admit to personally viewing pornography say they are “comfortable with how much pornography” they use.

“It’s just not a big deal to them … there’s no sense of urgency whatsoever,” said Sean McDowell, a professor at Biola University and host of the Think Biblically podcast. “I think this is an example where people are taking their cues far more from the culture and the ideas around us than Scripture and their Christian worldview.”

Yet, in the study, respondents who said they used porn at least semi-regularly were much more likely to report frequently feeling anxious, critical of themselves, easily overwhelmed, and depressed.

“There’s by and large a direct correlation between the more porn you watch and the less healthy you are mentally, emotionally, and relationally,” said Nick Stumbo, executive director at Pure Desire. “We can’t be fine with the behavior that’s undermining out mental, emotional, and relational health.”

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A recent Institute for Family Studies/YouGov poll reported similar findings correlating porn use with loneliness and depression. Its researchers flagged widespread porn addiction as a public health issue, noting how porn sites “use similar techniques as social media platforms, such as infinite scroll, autoplay, and personalized content, to keep users engaged,” and how frequent users seek out more extreme videos as they become desensitized.

Barna’s report includes a series of questions focused on “betrayal trauma,” or the impact a person’s porn use has on their spouse or significant other.

The differences between men and women are stark. Women were at least twice as likely to say their partner’s porn use hurt their relationship in some way. Forty-four percent of women said they worried their partner was no longer attracted to them, the top concern. Yet same share of men—44 percent—reported no concerns about their partners’ porn use.

Then there’s the impact pornography has on young people. The report showed that 39 percent of Gen Z adults view porn daily or weekly. Plus, more than half of younger millennials and Gen Z adults (ages 18–37) say they have sent a nude image of themselves, and three-quarters say they have received them, Barna found.

Other recent studies have indicated that kids are seeing porn much earlier than previous generations—the average age for kids’ first exposure to pornography is now 12.

Stumbo said Pure Desire is developing training curricula for parents who are looking for ways to talk about pornography with their kids. But even that strategy faces hurdles: The Barna study asked respondents who or what has had the greatest impact on their views of sex and sexual behavior. “My mom” and “my dad” ranked lower than “my friends,” “television or movies,” “internet research,” and pornography itself.

“If you really want to help your teens, one of the best things you can do is address your own story and your own brokenness in your sexuality,” he said. “The healthier you get, the healthier you can help your teens get.”

McDowell said it’s important for churches to offer resources for people struggling with porn, even if they claim they don’t see a problem with it. The survey found that 83 percent of adults with a history of porn use have no one in their lives helping them avoid it.

“I suspect [Christians] aren’t looking at porn because they found the arguments against it unconvincing,” he said. “There’s often hurt, brokenness, there’s anxiety, there’s … underlying stressors and bad theology that prevents people from getting the help that they need.”

He recommends that in addition to teaching about healthy sexuality from the pulpit, every church should have a support group for people struggling with any kind of addiction, sexual in nature or not.

Juli Slattery, a psychologist and founder of Authentic Intimacy, agreed that offering a safe community for people struggling with pornography is key. She contibuted one of the experts weighing in on the report’s findings.

“You can tell people ‘God says stop looking at porn,’” Slattery wrote. “But if you don’t provide the tools and the community for them to address those deeper issues, a lot of people are going to feel really stuck. [Many Christians] don’t understand what’s being lost when sexuality is broken because they see sexuality more in terms of being a behavioral ethic and not a deeply spiritual battleground.”

Stumbo at Pure Desire said he’s noticed waning interest in hosting porn recovery ministries in churches over the past few years, following a boom of awareness and interest in the early 2000s.

The rise of the internet prompted the founding of several porn recovery ministries, including Covenant Eyes, which offers software to help people avoid online pornography, and XXXchurch. The issue continued to garner attention in the years that followed, especially after the release of the smartphone.

Conservative Protestant Men Are Still Resisting PornLyman Stone

Waging a Smarter War on PornMark Regnerus

Barna’s previous survey on porn use, “The Porn Phenomenon,” came out in 2016. At the time, “it seemed to be a season where this bubble burst onto the scene and churches were like, ‘We’ve got to do something about pornography,’” Stumbo said. Two years prior, Pure Desire had released its popular Conquer Series, a porn addiction recovery video curriculum that’s now been viewed by more than 2 million men in more than 100 countries.

“Pure Desire grew a ton in those couple of years,” Stumbo said. Around that same time, in 2016, Covenant Eyes widened its mission and started partnering with other ministries to raise awareness about porn in the church. A year earlier, Christians founded Protect Young Eyes, a ministry to help schools and families create safe tech policies for kids.

Stumbo said focus on the issue has somewhat faltered since then: “As we look back … I think the church kind of moved on.”

The church’s perceived apathy toward pornography could inadvertently reinforce another common myth: Barna’s survey showed 66 percent of adults believe that “with enough willpower, a person can overcome porn addiction on their own.”

Like any addiction, however, the first step toward recovery is admitting to having a problem. If nearly two-thirds of Christians believe it’s possible to regularly view pornography and still live a healthy life, that first step may be the hardest.

The moral normalization of porn use could have one small upside: Barna CEO David Kinnaman said survey respondents are much more willing to be open and honest about their porn habits than they used to be—a helpful trend for social science researchers to capture the extent of the problem. He likened this openness to millennials’ and Gen Zers’ increasing openness about their mental health struggles.

“This kind of thing used to be harder to ask,” Kinnaman said. “It really is remarkable how honest people will be … especially online.”

Kinnaman said he hopes the study will convict pastors to attend to their congregations’ struggles with porn across all areas of discipleship. That means teaching a biblical view of sexual wholeness from the pulpit and fostering true community among small groups, where people can encounter an alternative to the “internal scripts” that allow them to rationalize their sins.

But he worries the problem isn’t going away anytime soon. Every survey prompts researchers to start brainstorming the questions they’ll ask next time, he said, and this one is no exception.

“We think we’re living in the porn age now,” he said. “Just wait until AI.”

The post More Christians Are Watching Porn, But Fewer Think It’s a Problem appeared first on Christianity Today.

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There were lots of tears at the Global Methodist Church’s first General Conference, held this week in San José, Costa Rica, to officially found the new denomination. They were tears of joy, relief, and gratitude for the holy love of God.

“I cried,” said Jeff Kelley, pastor of a Global Methodist church in McCook, Nebraska. “I haven’t cried in worship in a long time. And then we had worship the next day, and I cried again.”

John Weston, pastor of a Silverdale, Washington, church and one of 21 candidates to serve as an interim bishop during the denomination’s formation period, said he felt like he couldn’t stop crying. And Emily Allen, an Asbury Theological Seminary student serving as a delegate for churches in the Northeast, wept in worship too.

“The times of worship every day have prepared us to be the church we need to be,” Allen said. “To hear the Word of God declared very boldly, to hear the invitation to receive the Spirit, to receive the holy love of God? I was just kneeling and crying.”

Many of the more than 300 delegates and 600 alternates and observers from 33 countries remembered there had been tears in past years at past conferences too. The internal strife in the United Methodist Church and the ongoing quarrels over basic theological issues, including human sexuality, the authority of Scripture, and the responsibilities of bishops, had often emotionally wrecked them. In Costa Rica, establishing a separate Methodist denomination, the tears were different.

“There’s a different spirit—it’s like a square and a circle,” said Steve Beard, editor in chief of Good News, the leading evangelical Methodist magazine. “There are disagreements here, but they are respectful, and you don’t have the automatic categorization and dismissal. They’re crying about Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Let it roll! That’s old-time Methodism.”

The newest “old-time” church met for five days at a convention center to modify and ratify the decisions of the Transitional Leadership Council, which was organized in 2022. Delegates debated educational requirements for clergy, regional representation on committees, and the exact shape of the episcopacy.

They considered a proposed constitution, debated amendments, as well as amendments to amendments, and then passed their constitution on September 24 by a vote of 323–2. People cheered—and then sat silent, a little stunned, struck by awe at the significance of what they had done—before rising to sing “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.”

“We’re doing a new thing,” said Yassir A. Kori, a Global Methodist from Sudan who works with refugees in Oklahoma. “It’s full of the Spirit, and grace, and sanctification.”

The new church is made up of 4,733 congregations at the time of formation, putting it in the top 20 denominations in the United States. It is larger, counting by congregations, than the Presbyterian Church in America, the Anglican Church in North America, and the Association of Free Will Baptists combined.

The Global Methodists have organized 36 regional groups, called annual conferences, including 16 outside of the United States. Keith Boyette, the retiring leader of the transitional church, announced the Global Methodist Church has also been legally recognized in six more countries, paving the way for additional annual conferences.

A number of bishops from independent Methodist groups outside the US attended the convening General Conference as guests and witnesses.

Ricardo Pereira Díaz, leader of a group of 580 congregations and 120 mission churches in Cuba, said he doesn’t expect his church to join the Global Methodists.

“We have a friendship without commitment,” he said. “They believe in the Bible. They believe in evangelization. They believe in sanctification. We are in sync.”

Global Methodists Run Toward RenewalDaniel Silliman in North Carolina

Global Methodists Want to Check BishopsDaniel Silliman

The independent Methodist church in Costa Rica, which hosted the General Conference, is not expected to formally join either. But the Global Methodists signed a cooperative agreement with the Iglesia Evangélica Metodista de Costa Rica as one of its first official acts of business.

On the other hand, Eduard Khegay, the Moscow-based bishop of 80 congregations in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, said his group will vote on joining the Global Methodists in April.

“It’s the orthodox Wesleyan faith,” Khegay said. “They have the same heart for evangelism and mission that we do. My desire is to join, but we have to vote.”

While the majority of the church is currently in America, a lot of diversity was on display at the conference. Delegates spoke French, Spanish, Korean, and Swahili, in addition to English, with real-time translation done by artificial intelligence and a support team of human translators. A group of 29 delegates from the Democratic Republic of the Congo were not able to get visas to travel to Costa Rica, so the Global Methodists paid for them to go to a hotel with fast, secure internet so they could participate remotely. The delegates joined by Zoom, unmuted themselves to speak for and against a number of motions, and voted online.

The Global Methodists are planning to have their next General Conference in Africa in 2026, though arrangements have not all been finalized.

“When we say ‘global,’ that’s not just a nod, that’s our DNA,” said Suzanne Nicholson, Asbury University New Testament professor. “We’re not meeting in the US, and that says something. It says this really is a global church and the conference is a picture of Revelation 7, with people from every nation, tribe, people, and language before the throne and before the Lamb.”

Many of the Methodists gathered in Costa Rica said, however, that they were struck less by the diversity of the convening conference than its unity.

“When you read in Acts about the unity of the church, this is what you think it’s supposed to feel like,” said Victoria Campbell, a minister from Katy, Texas.

Johnwesley Yohanna, a bishop from Nigeria, agreed. “There is love and joy, and we praise God and are free,” he said. “There is no misbehaving, no fighting, no shouting.”

That’s not to say there were no disagreements. Debates in Costa Rica occasionally got tense, with voices rising.

A proposed amendment regulating committee assignments, intended to force regional diversity, prompted multiple people to protest they didn’t want to be “handcuffed” by a denomination that didn’t trust them to make good decisions. Discussion of ministers’ rights to trial in an ecclesiastical court brought out anguished references to “the situation in a previous denomination.” And delegates expressed strong feelings about the roles and responsibilities of bishops.

Matthew Sichel, a deacon from Manchester, Maryland, said that after years of conflict in the United Methodist Church, he was struggling to unlearn the habit of fighting.

“Each year at the Annual Conference, I was there to stand for orthodoxy. That was my job. We were having arguments about whether Jesus is Lord. We learned to fight. We had to. I’d go to the microphone to fight. It’s hard to let go of that,” he said.

Zawdie “Doc” Abiade, a pastor in Muskegon, Michigan, and a Christian counselor, said some of the delegates displayed signs of post-traumatic stress and there is still a lot of need for healing.

“The unhealthy comes out in displaced anger,” Abiade said. “The question is, how do we find Christ in trauma? We’re often told to forget, but we’re not designed as humans to forget. My counsel is not to run from it but face it with Jesus. Go back to the hurt and find Jesus.”

The Methodists frequently reminded each other over the five days that they are still being sanctified. They are not yet perfected, but the Holy Spirit is stronger than sin and still at work in them.

And their denomination is just getting started too. Things can change, they said to each other, and will change, getting worked out in committee meetings, ministry, and future General Conferences.

“[Decisions] are up to the church but we must make room for the possibility of adjusting tomorrow,” said Sunday Onuoha, a Nigerian bishop. “We trust their will be discernment. We make decisions and know the Holy Spirit is at work—but it’s a work in progress, not a work accomplished.”

Some of the decisions made at the General Conference were explicitly put forward as temporary measures. The church decided to elect six interim bishops, in addition to the two already in place, to serve two-year terms. At the gathering in 2026, the Global Methodists will transition to a more permanent episcopal structure, with bishops responsible for teaching and spiritual leadership—but not day-to-day administration—consecrated for six-year terms, with a two-term limit.

One of the big debates in Costa Rica was over the process for nominating the interim bishops and whether or not those people could be reelected in two years. The explicitly temporary measures, in some cases, caused more anxiety than long-term decisions.

As those discussions happened, Methodists from around the world paced in the back of the convention hall, praying over everything. One man read promises from Scripture, kneeling at a chair in a corner. Others raised their hands and whispered prayers, the hiss of the word Jesus just audible in the back of the room.

“Jesus be our stage director,” prayed Hui Angie Vertz, a Korean American minister at a church in Hazen, North Dakota. “We aren’t here to direct you in our play. It’s your play, Jesus. Holy Spirit direct us.”

Before major votes, the Methodists took time to pray as a group. After big decisions, they burst into song. When they elected their interim bishops on September 25, the room of nearly 1,000 people stood up and sang the Doxology a cappella:

Praise God from whom all blessings flow
Praise him all creatures here below
Praise him above ye heavenly host
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Sally Jenkins, a pastor’s wife from Sidney, Nebraska, said it felt like coming home after a long time away. The singing gave her goose bumps.

“We are a people who exude love for the Lord in our music,” she said. “To have the Spirit move—there are so many emotions and tears, it just does something to you, you know?”

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This year has been rough for the church in Dallas–Fort Worth where I pastor. At least eight pastors, and recently another, have been publicly disqualified for inappropriate relationships or abusive behavior. Enough people emerged from the wreckage and made their way to our local body that I addressed the pain of this summer from the pulpit a couple of times.

As so many have done in recent years, we could look at the mess, shake our fists, and declare, “I’m done with the church!” Many have. And some have deconstructed the whole thing and left Jesus behind, not just his bride.

Or we could see these trials for what they are: a fierce God, jealous and protective of his people, rescuing his sheep from the mouths of their shepherds (Ezek. 34:10). All shepherds are susceptible. We should “stand in fear” (1 Tim. 5:20, ESV).

My ministry started with wreckage all around me.

I was barely 30 years old—no ministry experience, no seminary degree, just starting to plant a new church—when the pastor who had coached and mentored me took his own life.

It was 2010. We were gathering people in our little living room, hoping the Spirit would breathe life into this new work, and I started wondering what I had gotten myself into.

I was a former professional baseball player with a past. The gospel had collided with my heart and changed me. Grace compelled me to ministry; I never asked for it. I certainly wasn’t seeking fame or money or power. I also had no idea what I was doing.

And it wasn’t just my mentor who had lost his life; he was just the one who hit closest to home. Around that time, a Texas pastor in my circles committed suicide—with his elders in the next room. Another on the West Coast shipwrecked his marriage and consequently his ministry.

Boom. Three hits in about three months, just as I was getting started.

Over the years, every few months or so, I’d hear of another pastor disqualifying himself. It was typically the same story, either abusive authority or inappropriate relationships. A misuse of relational equity with those under their authority, either way.

That was my first ten years of ministry.

And then Darrin Patrick took his life. While Darrin didn’t mentor me personally, he was the first church planter I had met. A baseball guy. A dude I could relate to with a big, influential church. I was crushed.

I decided then that the scoreboard had to change.

Not long after his death, a woman in our church passed away. She was young, only in her forties. We had a few months to say goodbye, and watching her and her husband face death taught me something. They taught me that my job as a husband is to make it faithfully to the end. My job as a dad, as a Christian, as a pastor, is just to make it to the end faithfully (2 Tim. 4:5–8).

What if the goal of ministry is just making it to the end? What if the goal of marriage is just making it to the end? What if the goal of Christianity is just faithfully making it to the end?

We pastors can get so caught up watching the scoreboard: Am I winning? We want a more successful ministry. A bigger church. More influence. Viral content. For Christians not in ministry, it’s no different: Success. Money. Clout. A life envied.

But what if the scoreboard—the game we’re playing—is simply finishing?

At the end of Paul’s life, his eyes on the scoreboard, fourth quarter, time running out, this seemed to be his focus: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Tim. 4:7).

It might be easy to think it gets easier as you get older, with more years of experience behind you and temptation looking lackluster. I don’t know. Daniel was almost 80 when he faced the lion’s den. Abraham had some shady moments lying to cover his skin well into his 100s. Your greatest temptations probably won’t come in your 20s. Satan plays the long game.

Most of us know the practices we should employ to keep ourselves from becoming another news headline: accountability, spiritual vitality, pursuit of holiness, regular confession. This is all good advice—essential, even.

But I wonder if changing the game in our mindset first gets us halfway there: Just make it to the end.

Stop playing ministry online. Don’t preach to the sermon reel or the livestream audience. We know the scoreboard isn’t butts and bucks, but it’s also not tribal affirmation or congregational applause. Don’t play that game. It’s not a win if you lose your soul.

Instead, play the long game. Lead, shepherd, and preach for 40 years, and be astonished at all the fruit the Spirit will produce in and through your ministry. Every young pastor or church planter I know overestimates what they think they can accomplish in the short term and underestimates what God can do through them over the long haul.

Certainly, a pastor running on emotional and spiritual fumes is more likely to end up on the side of the road in marriage and ministry. But even here the right scoreboard comes into play. We should pour ourselves out. Pastor Paul spoke of facing “daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches” (2 Cor. 11:28). And he certainly burned out for his people: “So I will very gladly spend for you everything I have and expend myself as well.” (2 Cor. 12:15).

But if the scoreboard you’re watching is still “faithful to the end,” you won’t measure success in the wrong places and end up doing the wrong things. Decide today what game you’re playing in your ministry. Decide today what the scoreboard is. Decide today what you will do tomorrow.

Jesus said, “Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you life as your victor’s crown” (Rev. 2:10). Pastor Paul looked forward to the “crown of righteousness” after his good fight and finished race (2 Tim. 4:8). Peter encouraged us that we would “receive the crown of glory that will never fade away” when our senior pastor appears (1 Peter 5:4).

The Good Shepherd wore a crown of thorns that we might we receive a crown of life, righteousness, and glory at the end. As we keep ourselves in the love of God, he is able to keep us from stumbling and to present us blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy (Jude 21, 24).

Jim Essian is pastor of The Paradox Church in Fort Worth, Texas, and author of Send: Loving Your Church by Praying, Giving, or Going.

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In the Arab world today, the war in Gaza dominates the news, with its small Palestinian Christian community caught in the crossfire. But over the last decade, ancient churches have faced persecution in Syria and Iraq, while political instability and terrorism have threatened believers in Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan.

Nevertheless, the church’s activity in this region is about much more than war and persecution, as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) chapter of the Lausanne Movement’s State of the Great Commission report shows. For example, congregations have cared for refugees, and online ministries have expanded.

One notable development is the numerical growth of Muslim-background believers (MBBs).

The report provides an ominous description of Christianity in the MENA region: “The outlook for all Christian communities is negative.” Yet the section on MBBs concludes with hope amid the devastation, predicting that “a new church, from among the majority people, will rise up from the ashes of the traditional structures.”

CT spoke with Rafik Barsoum—coauthor of the MENA chapter, president of Message to All Nations, and pastor of a digital church initiative launched in 2022—to elaborate on key ideas in the report. He described the difficulties faced by MBBs and Christian-background believers (CBBs) alike, the witness offered by both, and why he dislikes the distinction between them.

Why did the report begin with a negative assessment?

Iraq, for example, is nearly bereft of Christians. The region is experiencing war, famine, terrorism, poverty, instability, and turmoil in every way. And with any turmoil anywhere, minorities are the first to be affected. In nearly every nation, if they are not facing outright persecution, struggles such as these pressure believers to leave the region.

Ancient churches are losing their people. The Middle East was once the beacon of Christian history; now it is at risk of losing its Christian presence.

But these struggles do not suggest a gloomy picture as concerns the work of Christ. We have seen signs of revival in the last decade like never before. But a price has been paid for it that is not often covered by the news or political analysis. We do not want this persecution to continue, but new signs of hope are emerging.

One of these signs of hope is the MBB community, which the report calls a “movement.”

The word movement is a missiological term describing an intangible awareness that God is drawing people to himself in ways we cannot explain, beyond the work of any one church or organization. It is as Jesus told Nicodemus: The wind blows where it will, and we see its effects in the wave that is forming. People are coming to know the truth through dreams and visions, the work of missionaries, the testimony of the church, and online media ministry.

Amid political turmoil, people are challenging taboos and delusions of the past—independently of this movement, but also as they witness Christian love in action. God is doing something unique.

Yet the report calls this movement “small.” How should it be measured?

The MBB movement is small compared to our aspirations.

We want to see more even as we cannot grasp its true size; only eternity will reveal it. We love to assess numbers for encouragement and evaluation. But while we do our due diligence, we should err on the side of caution in any calculations. After all, Jesus compared the kingdom to a mustard seed, small in appearance but great in significance.

But I have a more serious concern to raise about MBB and CBB terminology.

I come from a family in Egypt that traces its roots back to the time of Christ. And we were among the first evangelicals when missionaries came from the West. But classifying believers based on what background they come from is not healthy in the long term.

We all have different backgrounds—except for our shared experience of sin and death. Without Christ we are lost, and with him we are saved unto abundant life. We acknowledge that the MBB community has distinct features, but we strongly encourage people not to divide the body of Christ into categories. In the past 15 centuries, the Muslim world has never seen so many testimonies emerging as now. Yet our report does not intend to isolate them from the broader Christian scene; they are implicitly recognized in every description.

Our role as CBBs especially is to de-label us all as we emphasize unity.

Many MBBs worship separately from other Christians. Is this appropriate?

It depends on the circumstances.

In many places, separate worship is necessary due to security concerns, familial and social pressures, or prejudice from either side. In other settings, it is possible for MBBs and CBBs to meet together. But in all cases, we are one in Christ and united in heaven. We cannot advise against separate MBB meetings, but we emphasize our ontological solidarity.

Joint fellowship can be decided only at the local level. We do not live in an ideal world, but biblically speaking, there is no Jew or Gentile, no MBB or CBB. I want our ecclesiology to be correct in principle, but I would allow for different expressions, as we have to do what’s possible when the ideal is elusive.

I challenge both MBBs and CBBs to think of one another as beloved peers. We are building the kingdom of God together, united forever in eternity. We might as well dissolve our differences now.

How else is life challenging for MBBs?

The Muslim world is very diverse, from strict fundamentalist contexts with high persecution to more modern and secular contexts that allow for more variation—at least in theory. Persecution exists on a scale.

Many MBBs have lost their jobs, property, and inheritance. They face family dissolution. Their children get assigned to Islamic rather than Christian education in school when their family names indicate their Muslim background. Women are often more affected, as they have less social protection.

But there is also a challenge that comes from MBBs’ understanding of identity. Faith is intertwined with who they are, not just a system of belief as in many Western countries. In the Eastern mentality, I am because we are. It is not just a matter of changing their religion but of being detached from their roots. It is a major psychological challenge to come to Christ, and this factor is not easily addressed.

I admire the courage of our MBB friends and rejoice in the grace God gives them. Many are maturing in their faith and assuming servant-leadership roles in the church.

The report also cited their courage, specifically regarding MBBs’ “public embrace” of faith. Amid persecution, is it necessary for them to proclaim their Christianity?

This is a contentious issue in missions circles. But Jesus said, “Whoever acknowledges me before others, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven” (Matt. 10:32). And Jesus said the same about denial. Following Christ comes with a cost. He was rejected, and we will be rejected, but he has overcome the world.

I cannot speak on behalf of MBBs because I am from a context where I can declare my faith in Christ. How to do it wisely is a different question, and there is no general answer. If new Christians are to grow in Christ, they must be surrounded by a wise group of mature believers who walk the journey with them. This is the role of the body of Christ. Those in the church understand the context and are the ones God uses to provide advice.

But each new believer must get to a place where they confess Christ publicly.

The report celebrates that CBBs are also bold in sharing their faith.

Their witness goes beyond direct evangelizing. This last decade witnessed the martyrdom of Egyptian Coptic Christians in Libya who refused to renounce their faith under ISIS. And when the Muslim Brotherhood regime was overthrown in Egypt, the church responded in love and forgiveness as it stood for the truth. It is good to be bold, yet we must be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.

The church faces clear evidence of opposition.

What is happening now is a continuation of one of the main contributions of Christians from the MENA region to the global body of Christ. Local believers have been standing with Jesus since the apostles started the church. Athanasius, a fourth-century bishop from Alexandria, was told, “The whole world is against you.” He replied, “Yes, but I am against the world.”

We have our blemishes, but we have withstood persecution.

How likely is it that one who shares their faith will be persecuted?

It is certainly possible. We have to stress wisdom, wise counsel, and accountability to the local church—especially for foreign missionaries, who, if working independently, can sometimes do more harm than good. In some places, witnessing will be overlooked. In others, it may result in questioning by the state police. Social discrimination is possible. So are surveillance and imprisonment.

People in the MENA region take religion very seriously.

But we are seeing that if Arab believers live a Christlike example and describe how their way of life stems from their personal faith, people want to ask them more. This pattern of inviting inquiry removes many social barriers and gives Christians near immunity from security services. And most importantly, it paves the way for the gospel to be understood and relevant.

Another positive trend in the report celebrates greater cooperation between Christian denominations.

Cooperation is definitely improving. Christians of different denominations can sit together and listen to each other, whereas we used to build animosity upon assumptions. My prayer is that this growing communication will develop further into understanding each other and working together. One sign of hope is that several leaders have demonstrated love to one another.

Evangelicals have long been seen by people in the Catholic and Orthodox denominations as infidels or as wolves who steal sheep. But now that we are in communication, they see that we love Christ and want to serve his kingdom—not destroy their churches. This alone is a great result.

MBBs are a sign of revival. Might all Middle Eastern churches rise again?

Beyond those of a Muslim background, we see new expressions of faith in the digital church. And mature believers are emerging from all demographics, young and old, liturgical and charismatic. But the essentials are love for Christ, love for truth, and love for holiness—amid all that we witness in our world today. Unless the church stands on these pillars, all hope is superficial.

There is so much to anticipate for our region, built on the foundation of those who have gone before. The outlook does not have to stay negative.

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We tend to imagine Moses as someone larger than life. Films like The Ten Commandments, The Prince of Egypt, and Exodus: Gods and Kings focus on the heroic role he played in the epic struggle for the Israelites’ liberation from slavery. They build up to dramatic moments like the parting of the Red Sea and the giving of the law at Mount Sinai.

The Promised Land takes a somewhat different approach. It’s a comedy done in the style of mockumentaries like The Office and Parks and Recreation, using humor to highlight the humanity of Moses and his people as they trudge through the desert and get used to the daily grind of life after Egypt.

Moses (The Chosen’s Wasim No’mani) is worn down by the Israelites’ petty complaints. His resentful sister Miriam (a delightfully deadpan Shereen Khan) is irritated by his bubbly wife Zipporah (Tryphena Wade) in a subplot inspired by Numbers 12:1. And his suspicious cousin Korah (Brad Culver) begins to notice there’s something odd about Chisisi (Dav Coretti), an Egyptian who ended up on the wrong side of the Red Sea and is now trying to pass himself off as a Hebrew.

The series currently consists of just one episode, a pilot that covers the events of Exodus 15–18. (It’s now playing on YouTube.) But the producers recently secured $5 million to make five more episodes, which they will start shooting at the end of this month.

Writer and director Mitch Hudson, who has been an assistant director on The Chosen since it went into production six years ago (he works primarily with the background actors) says he hopes to shoot 40 episodes of The Promised Land.

But first, he has to get the first season done.

Christianity Today had a chance to speak to Hudson about the series. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Just for starters, I have to confirm: On The Chosen, you are an assistant director, not an assistant to the director?

Yes! Not the director’s assistant, not the assistant to the director, I’m an assistant director. Yeah, that’s funny. I’m not Dallas’s Dwight.

You’ve worked with crowd scenes on The Chosen and now you’re doing your own series about Moses, who’s associated with the proverbial cast of thousands.

We’re going to do something very special in the first season that will hopefully incorporate hundreds of people. [After the interview, it was announced that fans can volunteer to be extras for an episode called “The Tabernacle.”] Certainly, it’s familiar territory for me after all that we’ve done on The Chosen.

You’ve said that you aren’t reverent toward your characters but you are reverent toward God. But that doesn’t mean God doesn’t have funny lines.

When I read some of God’s conversations with Moses in the Bible, I just want to burst out laughing. Like when the Israelites complain they don’t get to eat any meat and God’s reply is basically, Oh you’ll eat meat. You’ll eat lots of it. You’ll get sick of it (Num. 11:18–20).

I think people can be nervous about depicting biblical characters as people who made mistakes, who did things that were wrong and fell on their faces. Sometimes we think we can’t show the weaknesses of characters in Scripture because somehow that would be disrespectful. They’re in the Bible, and the Bible is holy, and so if they’re in the Bible, then we need to treat them that way too.

But the truth is that God used them because they were people and because they were imperfect, and I’m trying to depict them the way that they are in Scripture—as people who have flaws, as people who do make mistakes but keep trying anyways. Hopefully we find a little bit of connection to them.

As for the conversations between God and Moses, you’re right, there’s definitely some humor in there.

But those conversations with God and Moses we can’t see—because the documentary crew can’t go there. The documentary crew can’t go up onto the mountain with Moses; they can’t go into the Holy of Holies. So those conversations are private. I’m trying to do that on purpose because I don’t want it to ever be that I’m looping in God with the jokes.

But then when Moses comes back and he’s trying to communicate what God has said, then I can get into the fallibleness, basically, of Moses trying to convince hundreds of thousands of people to listen to him—and he’s not a born leader. That, to me, is naturally very funny.

related‘The Chosen’ Sets Its Face Toward JerusalemPeter T. Chattaway in Los Angeles

You’ve said that you’re looking forward to shooting the Golden Calf episode (Ex. 32), that it’ll be “fun” but also “hurt.” How will you approach that tonal mix?

Also, the biblical version of that story ends on a very violent note. In the pilot, violence is alluded to but it’s all offscreen or in the past; we don’t really confront it. Is Promised Land going to go there? And if so, how is it going to balance that with the humor?

For me the main thing is trying to never undercut the severity of a moment that’s in the Bible but also recognizing that you can show a piece of a story, not show the whole thing, and still communicate how devastating it was.

My goal is that this is generally a show you can watch with your family (circumcision jokes aside).

There are also some mystical things in the biblical story—Moses has a glowing face, so he has to wear a veil (Ex. 34:29–35), people see God standing on something like a pavement “bright blue as the sky” on Mount Sinai (Ex. 24:9–10). Maybe some of those things the documentary crew won’t get to see, but you’re at least going to have to deal with the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire (Ex. 13:21–22).

The scripts that I’ve written for the next five episodes incorporate some of these mystical moments of people seeing God in different ways. God appears as a thunderstorm at the top of the mountain at one point. He also descends upon the tabernacle as a cloud.

For us, it was a question of “How can we portray these elements of the story while also being limited as a documentary crew?” What could we see that everyone else could see?

There are going to be some fun ways that we incorporate the regular citizens’ perspective on some of these supernatural moments that I think will make them really interesting.

relatedWhy We Love ‘The Chosen’ So MuchLuke Burgis

How easy was it to raise funds for a comedy? With The Chosen, there’s always been a ministry aspect—a lot of people get invested in the show because it’s going to have an “impact.” Is The Promised Land going to have an “impact”?

I think so often it can be difficult for people to engage with biblical material when it is serious and heavy. I hope to provide an alternative where we can still be engaging with the truth of Scripture but with a more light-hearted tone.

I never knew much about Jethro before I reread the passages that mention him while preparing for the pilot. Now, I’ve obviously made the pilot, but even if I had just seen it, I think I would have a different perspective on that story.

Ultimately, what’s powerful about the story of Moses is that it’s the origin of the framework that Jesus disrupts: “These are the laws; this is how you can make sacrifices to atone for sin.” This sets the stage for Jesus’ arrival.

So my hope is that The Promised Land does lay a bit of a foundation—and also is super fun.

The post ‘The Office’ Meets Exodus in ‘The Promised Land’ appeared first on Christianity Today.

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In 1991, as a young girl, I surrendered my life to Jesus Christ. It was not an easy decision, for I was born and raised in a devout Sikh family. Sikhism is among the youngest of the world religions, founded in AD 1469 in the northern state of Punjab, India.

I was born in a military hospital in Meerut in the state of Uttar Pradesh as the youngest of four children. My father’s service with the Indian army required us to move every few years.

Being a very smart child in kindergarten, I was promoted one grade ahead to learn alongside my sister Anu, who is 16 months older than me. Until age 17, I studied at Catholic schools in every city where my father was posted. However, I never knew Jesus as anything more than one of many gods presented in the diverse faiths of my country.

As a family, we attended the Sikh temple every Sunday and partook in the langar—the communal meal shared by all who visit the temple. There were phases in my life when we went to the Sikh and Hindu temples every evening, leaving a deep and lasting impact on my young mind.

A test and a promiseA year before I found Christ, my father was posted in Roorkee, which is now in the state of Uttarakhand, where I struggled to cope with a new school, a new uniform, and new friends. In my struggle, I turned to all the various gods I had worshiped throughout my childhood. I often ended up in the bathroom, where in solitude I prayed with tears to Guru Nanak, Allah, Rama, Jesus, and Sai Baba, begging them for help. After much hard work that year, I barely passed my final exams. Ashamed of my performance, I contemplated committing suicide.

While I was still planning how to end my life, my father decided that my older sister Anu and I should continue our studies in the western city of Ahmednagar, where we had been stationed before and where my brother was already pursuing his undergraduate studies. This, he thought, would ease the academic transition and hopefully improve our results.

So Anu and I got admitted as 12th grade students and moved to a girl’s hostel (our brother was living in the boy’s hostel). There, a senior named Anita shared the gospel with us. My sister accepted Christ, having been miraculously healed of a long-standing ailment. But I opposed Anita and the message she tried to convey, speaking ill of her to those I knew.

After three months in this city and college, my mother decided to join us. She rented a house, and we moved out of the hostel to live with her. I was glad to get away from Anita and her message.

I Wanted a Bigger God Than My Hindu Guru OfferedRahil Patel

However, a few months later, as I prepared for my approaching exams, the fear and failure of the previous year gripped my heart. I sought out Anita and asked if her Jesus would help me in my exams. She said he would, but I had to promise not to cheat, which was difficult for me since I did cheat. Nevertheless, I made the promise.

Ready to test this God of Anita’s, I embarked on a journey of discovery. I borrowed the Bible that Anita had given Anu, and every day I walked about 500 meters from our rented house, sitting under the shade of a big stone. For the next 40 days, I studied my course books and the Bible there from morning until sunset.

Initially, whenever I opened the Bible to a random page, I could make no sense of what I read. But then, one day, as I pondered the position of Jesus among all the gods I had known, I opened the Bible in my usual manner. Soon thereafter, I noticed one verse on that page was slightly magnified, while the rest of the page was dim. My eyes were drawn to that magnified verse, John 14:6: “Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’”

I was stunned—not only at the visual presentation of the verse but also at its profound challenge to my polytheistic belief system. I closed my eyes and opened them again to check whether the words still appeared larger. And they did.

From that day on, the Bible came alive to me. I began to talk to God several times each day, and every time I opened the Bible randomly, I found a verse specially magnified for me. That was God’s way of communicating with me.

Eventually, I appeared for my exams, and as promised, I did not cheat. When the results were out, I stood third in the college. But instead of exulting in triumph, I felt ashamed of having exploited an almighty, all-powerful God for my own advancement. I confessed to the Lord, “Though I started to follow you out of selfish ambition, today I tell you that henceforth, whether I pass or I fail, I will follow you.”

One day, the Lord said to me, “I have written your name in the Book of Life. Do you know what name it is?” I had always been embarrassed of being called Surinder, a unisex Sikh name. But God wanted it recorded among the names of his people. This helped reconcile me not only to my own identity but also to the God who loved me just as I was.

But I still needed to learn new habits of self-denial. God told me, “Forgive all those who have hurt you.” It was difficult, for some hurts ran deep, but remembering what Jesus had done for me, I obeyed. The next step was even more challenging: “Now go and ask forgiveness from all those whom you have hurt and return all the things that you have in your possession that do not belong to you.”

I was flabbergasted. How could I humiliate myself by asking for forgiveness? But if I wanted to follow Jesus, God told me in no uncertain terms, then I had to take up my cross. “Obedience is necessary,” I recall hearing in a quiet, still voice. “Don’t worry about the outcome.”

Quiet hoursTo my amazement, the outcome was not what I expected. In fact, my confession resulted in deep peace, joy, and a greater awareness of the Lord’s presence in my life.

Excited about my newfound faith, I shared the gospel with my mother. But she snubbed me, saying I had not reached an age for talking about God or religion. Instead, she said, I should have fun, eat well, and be happy.

Soon, we moved to a new city to join my father after he got transferred again, and the whole family was reunited. We said a tearful goodbye to Anita, whom I never saw again. Since Anu and I had only one Bible between us, we tore it into two parts and occasionally swapped the portions. The short time we had spent with Anita prepared us to face the tense situation with our family members, who wanted to stamp out our new faith. When I was down, I sang the few hymns and choruses I had heard Anita sing.

We had no church to attend or fellowship with other believers, so we were entirely dependent on our Bible and illumination from the Holy Spirit. Lacking privacy at home and being forbidden to pray openly, we resorted to spending hours alone with the Bible, locked in the bathroom. It was during those quiet hours that the Lord led me through verse-by-verse, teaching me how to read the Bible, meditate on it, and learn from it.

The Humbling of a Proud HinduKamesh Sankaran

That instruction included a call to repentance. I remember protesting, “I have not committed any sin. I am just a girl of 17.” But the Holy Spirit replayed episodes across my life, dating back to when I was only 3 years old. It turned out I had much to repent of! As a result, my bathroom spiritual-growth sessions got longer, sometimes stretching to more than half the day.

My family did not give up trying to reconvert us. Relatives physically assaulted us, took us to a psychiatrist to test our sanity, and called in Sikh evangelists to try convincing us of our supposed folly; even Roman Catholic priests were summoned to make us change our minds. All these interventions had one purpose: to prove the superiority of my family’s Sikh faith.

There were periods when I doubted the choice to follow this “God of the Christians.” But the Lord would reassure me with words from Scripture, which kept my feet grounded and helped me persevere. Whenever doubt arose, certain verses kept ringing in my ear, like Luke 9:62 (“No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”) or Matthew 10:37 (“Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”).

And God’s promises for my future were my only anchor. I remember finding assurance in Matthew 19:29, which says, “And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.”

As a last resort, my family separated me from Anu and sent me to my father’s native state of Punjab to stay with relatives, thinking the environment would somehow break my faith and cause me to see reason. But even then, the Lord vindicated his name through many signs and wonders.

While I was exiled in Punjab, my parents took Anu to a witch doctor, hoping to cast the Holy Spirit out of her. The witch doctor set her inside a circle made of lemon and chili, threw ashes on her head, and chanted mantras over her for almost an hour. But to no avail. He turned to my parents and said, “He who is inside her is way more powerful than the [spirit] who is inside me.” They were astonished and speechless.

Meanwhile, in Punjab, the entire village knew that when I prayed to this God of mine, miracles would occur. To give one example: In July 1993, Punjab witnessed massive rainfall. It lasted for days on end, killing hundreds and affecting half the state’s population. My aunts came and asked if I could pray to make the rain stop. I said I would, but only when the Lord led me to.

Soon, there was no food in the house and no place to sit or sleep, as the entire roof was leaking and portions of the house had collapsed. One day, after we had to send my cousins away hungry, I ran to a room drenched in rainwater and tearfully began to pray. When I finished, I stepped outside to see that the rain had ceased. My aunts changed their view of me from that day forward. Every now and then, they would ask me about Jesus or invite me to sing a Christian chorus.

Amazement and gratitudeSeven years after my conversion, I was finally introduced to a church. By then, my father had passed away in an accident. My mother allowed Anu and me to attend worship services every Sunday, hoping it would result in us finding husbands.

Despite intense family pressure to marry, I waited upon the Lord. I told him that, as my heavenly Father, it was his responsibility to get me married, and I would not seek someone on my own. In his time and way, he brought a Christian husband into my life through my unbelieving oldest sister. Outwardly, this happened through the kind of arranged marriage that was common in our culture, but I believe God was the one doing the arranging.

Eventually, the Lord called me into full-time ministry. Over the ensuing 22 years, this call took me to many cities across five continents, where I have spoken about my experience and taught others what God has taught me from his Word. I have had the privilege of addressing women’s ministry leaders and pastors’ wives in both urban and rural settings, tackling key issues they face in their daily lives.

Having suffered persecution firsthand, I closely identify with persecuted Christians and thus advocate for their cause. Besides liaising with the police on behalf of victims, I present their stories to the world to mobilize awareness and prayer.

When I see the Lord using me to teach, preach, and counsel married women, couples, and children, I am filled with amazement and gratitude for all the ways he has blessed me. My prayer is that he will enable me to walk in his most perfect ways until I finally see him face to face: my Redeemer, my Savior, and my Father.

Surinder Kaur is the South Asia editor for Christianity Today.

The post When I Opened My Bible, God Gave Me a Magnifying Glass appeared first on Christianity Today.

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

Early in our marriage, when my wife and I had just moved to a new city while I was starting doctoral work, we attended a worship service—knowing almost no one there but hoping to make friends. The preacher, who mumbled a bit, was trying to make a rhetorical point about the importance of a good name: “I mean, how many of you ladies out there have the name Jezebel?” Time seemed to be in slow motion as I turned to see my wife, Maria, raising her hand.

Turns out she thought he had said, “How many of you ladies out there have heard the name Jezebel?” which, of course, she had. She blushed and immediately dropped her hand when she discovered the actual question, while I imagined meeting all of these new people to have them say, “It’s so nice to meet you, Jezebel. Welcome to our church.”

We made it through that moment, seemingly without anyone noticing (or else too polite to bring it up), and the years have proven that my wife lives up to her actual name—that of the mother and some of the disciples of Jesus—and not at all to that of the murderous queen who once hounded the prophet Elijah almost till death did them part. She sighs and rolls her eyes every time I tell that story and says, “That preacher was hard to understand—and you know it.” She’s right. Thirty seconds of Jezebel confusion—in this case—has made for thirty years of laughter from me.

Old Jezebel keeps showing up in other kinds of confusion, though, in ways that are not funny at all. On any given Sunday, I am at my church teaching through the Book of Revelation. I said the first week, We’re going to have a couple months in more familiar territory—as I teach through Jesus’ messages to the seven churches of Asia Minor— before things get weird.

What I meant was that the themes at the beginning of the Apocalypse are easier to grasp: keep persevering, repent of sin, don’t lose heart while suffering, return to your first love, and so on. Most people get confused or scared right after that part, with images of trumpets and seals and horsemen and multi-headed dragons and marks on the forehead. And so, I thought, the first third of Revelation is freer from the bad speculative teaching that keeps some people distant from Revelation. But then I remembered Jezebel.

The ascended Jesus sent a message through John the Revelator that there was one major point of disobedience in the congregation at Thyatira, namely that they “tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols” (Rev. 2:20, ESV throughout).

This past week, I happened upon a social media post from a minister (apparently in the Pentecostal or charismatic tradition) asserting, “There is no ‘Jezebel Spirit.’ At best, these are words used to silo and demoralize people you disagree with.” He went on, “I believe in the gifts of the Spirit—all of them. This is not godly. It’s wrong and demonic and needs to be purged from our vernacular.”

I’m not yet familiar with this minister’s work so I don’t know exactly what’s theologically in the background for him, but I do know that, on this, he’s exactly right—the concept of a “Jezebel spirit,” the way it’s often used today, has no grounding at all in Scripture and, ironically enough, is often used to fuel the very sin Jesus charged the Jezebel of Revelation with promoting.

Part of the confusion, of course, is with the way we use the language of “spirit.” One can speak of the “spirit of ’76,” referring to patriotism; or to someone having “the spirit of Barnabas,” implying they’re an encourager; or “the spirit of Lydia,” meaning they’re generous. One could speak of someone seeking to sell access to God as being of “the spirit of Simon.” But, usually, the language of the Jezebel spirit is used in our churches today to refer to something quite more than just that.

Many preachers or teachers name the Jezebel spirit as a specific demonic being or force, and, in doing so, portray a particularly dangerous and evil aspect of women—especially of women to men. Often, this will come with a list of “characteristics of the Jezebel spirit” that are disconnected from the actual words of the Bible. In most cases, one does not have to be a Freudian to wonder if these “characteristics” are not describing a particular woman or group of women with whom the preacher or teacher is perturbed.

The Bible does teach exactly what Jesus unequivocally acknowledged as true—that there are dark, spiritual personal beings afoot in the cosmos. The Scriptures sometimes speak of these beings as “principalities and powers.” In most cases, though, these beings are not named and classified for us. This is because their power is not, like a pagan god, independent of us.

The powers of this present darkness work through deception (Gen. 3:1–3) and accusation (Rev. 12:10). One of them screamed in his presence, “I know who you are—the Holy One of God” (Mark 1:24). But they had no power over Jesus. Of Satan, Jesus said, “The ruler of this world is coming. He has no claim on me” (John 14:30). [S1] That’s not only because of his deity but also because of his obedient humanity.

The spirits of darkness work through human fallenness and rebellion, which is why the scriptural remedy for them is the gospel, prayer, and repentance of sin—not talismans or incantations. When Jesus rebuked those in the church who “hold the teaching of Balaam” (Rev. 2:14), he was not speaking of some specifically masculine entity hypnotizing the congregation. He was speaking of those who imitated the prophet-for-hire of old. And when Jesus referenced a teacher as “Jezebel,” he did so in terms of the villain of ancient Israel—one who taught that God could be replaced with idols and that immorality could be carried out without accountability.

When the Jezebel spirit is taught, it is usually presented as eerily consistent with the pagan myths of the succubus, who would sexually attack men by night, or the myths of the sirens, who would lure unsuspecting men to their deaths. The implication is usually that there is something especially treacherous and dangerous—indeed, supernaturally treacherous and dangerous—about women.

Men, in this view, are seen through the lens of frailty—they are the sum of instincts and desires that are uncontrollable when in the presence of the power of the temptress—while women are viewed through the prism of calculating evil. This, of course, is inconsistent with the fundamental gospel truth that both men and women are fallen and, left to ourselves, under condemnation (Rom. 3:10–18).

Reading the Bible with WomenCarmen Joy Imes

The Jezebel spirit is convenient in a couple ways. I’ve seen it used to suggest that women who call for holiness and justice in the church should be shunned or ignored. In working with survivors of church sexual abuse, I’ve lost count of how many of them were told that their work for accountability was that of a Jezebel spirit. I have seen women who have done no wrong have their reputations destroyed. Some of them are exiled from their communities. Some are unjustly and unrelentingly harassed in law courts or by church discipline.

I’ve also lost count of how many male leaders have used the term, or something akin to it, to minimize their own culpability for sexual sin. The Jezebel spirit enables them to point to the problem before God as “the woman thou hast given to me,” who is simultaneously a superhuman serpent in the garden.

In many cases, men have used Jezebel language to use purported biblical authority to blame others—sometimes innocent people—for their own abuse of power. In other words, one is able to point to the Jezebel spirit while doing exactly what Jezebel did—crushing those who stand in the way of the sin one wants to commit (1 Kings 21:8–15). In so doing, it’s possible to twist the Bible to say what it doesn’t say (thus leading people to idolatry) while literally demonizing women in order to minimize one’s own sexual transgression (thus teaching people to excuse immorality). That’s exactly what the false prophet of Thyatira was doing.

Women are sinners, just as men are. The way of Jezebel is death; the way of Ahab is too. A woman who thinks she’s unable to follow the path of Nimrod or Esau or Jeroboam or Herod is deceiving herself. A man who thinks he’s unable to mimic the pattern of Jezebel is also. Redeemed women are heirs of the kingdom, just as redeemed men are. Women can fall into false teaching, just as men can. Women need the gospel, just as men do. To project one’s fear or loathing of women onto a Jezebel spirit isn’t to identify a demon but to imitate one.

Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.

The post How the ‘Jezebel Spirit’ Keeps Empowering Sin appeared first on Christianity Today.

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Today, more than 40 percent of the world has not yet been evangelized. Yet about 97 percent of the current global total of 450,000 Christian missionaries are sent to people who already have access to the gospel.

Another startling fact: In 1900, more than 80 percent of the world’s Christians lived in Europe or North America, but today only about 25 percent live in those regions. The remainder reside in the Global South, which includes Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania.

The geographic shift in Christianity also means a change in missionaries’ countries of origin. The United States still sends the greatest number of missionaries, but the next four countries are Brazil, South Korea, the Philippines, and Nigeria.

These are some of the findings from the State of the Great Commission Report released by the Lausanne Movement earlier this year, in advance of the Fourth Lausanne Congress in Incheon, South Korea. The report draws on research from international nonprofits and Christian organizations and presents insights from 150 global missions experts.

“The Great Commission is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end,” wrote Victor Nakah and Ivor Poobalan in one of the report’s essays. “The future is the presence of all tribes, tongues, nations, and languages worshipping the King at the end of the age.”

The success and unfinished task of global missionsDue to the work of missionaries and indigenous Christian movements, the gospel has now reached an estimated 4.57 billion people, while 3.34 billion have still not heard the gospel, according to data from the Joshua Project.

Yet most missionaries today aren’t going to countries with unreached people groups. “Most missionaries go to predominantly Christian or post-Christian contexts, leading to a lack of connection to and understanding of adherents to other religions,” the report noted. More missionaries go to Europe than to Asia, even though 60 percent of the world lives in Asia and sending a missionary to Europe costs 10 times as much.

The top sender—and the top receiver—of missionaries is the United States, with 135,000 missionaries going out and 38,000 coming in from abroad, according to the World Christian Database’s 2020 figures. The US Christian population is still the largest in the world, as about one-tenth of all Christians are American. Brazil follows with nearly 8 percent of the world’s Christians, due largely to the rapid spread of Pentecostalism. Brazil also sends out the second-highest number of missionaries with 40,000.

South Korea, with 35,000 missionaries, dropped from second to third place between 2015 and 2020. An aging missionary force and decreased involvement by younger Christians has contributed to this plateau. The 25,000 missionaries sent from the Philippines are mostly Catholics, and this number doesn’t include the Filipinos working overseas who function as bivocational missionaries.

In Nigeria, some churches are bypassing mission agencies and sending their missionaries directly to the unreached. An essay in the Lausanne report quoted a book by Yaw Perbi and Sam Ngugi: “The history of the world Christian movement is the story of collaboration between local churches and mission agencies [which] God has used … to advance the gospel right from the first century to date.”

Christianity’s growth in AfricaIn the past century, sub-Saharan Africa has seen the fastest growth of Christianity anywhere in the world. That region and Latin America are the areas where Pentecostalism has grown most powerfully. In 1970, sub-Saharan Africa had about 20 million Pentecostals; today that number has skyrocketed to 230 million, according to the World Christian Encyclopedia.

The Pew Research Center projected that by 2060, more than four in ten Christians will call sub-Saharan Africa home. Much of this shift is attributable to demographics, as the region has the world’s youngest population. Currently, the median age of Christians there is 19, compared to 39 in North America and 42 in Europe.

Sub-Saharan Africa is also more religious. In Nigeria, about 90 percent of adults attend religious services weekly, compared to less than 40 percent in the US. Although people age 18 to 39 attend weekly church services less often than those over 40 all over the world, the gap is smallest in sub-Saharan Africa, according to Pew.

“Every person thinking about missions must not only consider how Africa participates, but Africans themselves must be ready to be on the frontlines of the mission force,” wrote Ana Lucia Bedicks, Menchit Wong, and Maggie Gathuku in a Lausanne report essay.

The unreached in India and PakistanMeanwhile, a majority of the world’s unreached people groups (UPGs), defined as groups that don’t have “an indigenous church capable of evangelizing their own people,” reside in South Asia, specifically in Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Nearly 3,000 UPGs—or about three-fifths of the world’s total—are in those two countries.

Currently, more than 60 percent of the 30,000 Indian missionaries work within the country, according to Operation World. Christians in India are facing greater persecution as a Hindu nationalist government is in control and Hindutva ideology becomes entrenched in society.

India’s expanding middle class offers both barriers and opportunities for the gospel to flourish, according to an essay by Carl Ebenezer, Ted Esler, and James Patole. “The combination of India’s religious, deeply caste-based social structures with this secular and pluralistic context poses a huge challenge in presenting the uniqueness of Jesus Christ,” they wrote.

Yet at the same time, the authors noted that many in India’s middle class “are not necessarily convinced by and dedicated to the teachings of their religion. Many would be open to listening and changing their view if invited to do so in a way that speaks to their experiences and needs.”

Pakistan has the strictest blasphemy laws among Muslim-majority countries, which can lead to imprisonment and even death. Christians living in the cities are also forced into low-paying jobs in sanitation.

The report noted that South Asia “is poised to remain the least evangelized region for many decades to come.”

Polycentric missionsAs Christian centers shift away from the West and toward the Global South, missions activity is now polycentric, a term that means “from all nations to all nations,” according to Patrick Fung, global ambassador of OMF International.

An essay entitled “Polycentric Global Missions” argued that “mission has been polycentric from the start.” Although the early church began evangelizing in Jerusalem, persecution forced it to scatter across the Roman world and preach to the Jewish diaspora. Then believers went to Antioch to preach to the Gentiles; from there, Paul began his missionary journeys and planted churches, and those churches went on to spread the gospel further.

The report noted that with the exception of Europe, every region of the world “both sends and receives more missionaries than 50 years ago.” More missionaries are coming from countries where Christians are the minority, often helping them relate to the people they are trying to reach.

Yet one challenge is that Christian wealth is centered in North America, requiring discussions on how polycentric churches can encourage generosity, create “healthy channels” between Christians with more wealth and those with less, and identify new funding sources.

“If every culture has received the Great Commission, then every culture has the privilege of supporting the Great Commission,” said Scott Morton of the Navigators, who is quoted in another essay.

Diaspora missions One way the gospel is spreading is through the movement of people leaving their home countries due to hunger, war, persecution, better job opportunities, or family. In 2020, there were 281 million international migrants in the world, an increase of 60 million from a decade prior, according to the World Migration Report. Of those migrants, nearly half are Christians.

This pattern fits into polycentric missions, as Christian migrants are relocating to new locations where they can witness and plant seeds. At the same time, Christians in the destination countries can evangelize the new arrivals, who often are more willing to accept a new faith as they are far from the traditions and religions of their home.

“God is sovereign over human history and human dispersion,” Sam George wrote in the essay “People on the Move.” One result, he stated, is that “Christianity in the West is not declining, but immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Latin American are reviving it and transforming it with renewed missional thrust.”

For instance, the tightening of freedoms in Hong Kong has led to a boom of Chinese churches in Britain as citizens of the former British colony find refuge in the UK. In Belgium, African Christians are increasingly teaching religious education classes. In the US, Bhutanese Nepali churches are growing as they meet in church buildings where the local congregation is dying.

“Christianity is a missionary faith par excellence since it is a faith that was born to travel,” George noted.

The church opposing injusticeGlobally, the number of people living in extreme poverty has dropped from 2 billion in 1990 to 1 billion in 2019, according to the World Bank. The Lausanne report connected this trend with the importance of integral mission, which addresses not only a person’s spiritual needs but also physical, social, and economic concerns.

Human rights are more protected than in previous centuries. Yet government restrictions on religion have increased globally. North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia have seen the highest percentage of government use of force against religious groups, according to Pew.

Today, an estimated 40 million people are victims of forms of modern slavery, which include forced labor, sexual exploitation, and unwanted marriage. Women and girls are disproportionately affected, accounting for 70 percent of the victims of exploitation and 99 percent of victims in the sex industry.

“Though the church speaks out in certain pockets favoring the oppressed, in many of these cases it limits itself to statements from leadership and does not get it converted into actions,” wrote Christie Samuel, Jocabed Solano, and Jenny Yang in a Lausanne report essay. They urged the church to “take on its prophetic role by working more promptly in denouncing injustice, freeing the oppressed, and rising against the unrestricted freedom of the oppressors.”

Artificial intelligence presents both pitfalls and possibilitiesAnother seismic shift the missions community needs to take into account is how the internet is changing every facet of human life. The report stated that “the rise in digital media is potentially as transformative to Scripture engagement as the advent of the printing press in Early Modern Europe.”

With about 60 percent of the world connected to the internet, there are new opportunities for Bible apps that allow people to easily read and hear the Bible in their own language. Bible apps also provide a new way for people to access the Bible, especially in countries where security is a concern. Translation software, online collaboration tools, and crowd-sourcing have also expedited the Bible translation process.

At the same time, technological advances pose challenges for the church, particularly around artificial intelligence (AI) and what it means to be human.

“The proclamation of the gospel is not simply about information transfer but is rather a whole person transformation by the power of the Holy Spirit,” wrote the authors of the report’s essay on AI. They added that “many are seeking to harness the immense power of AI tools in the furtherance of the gospel message to all people, tribes, and nations.”

The authors acknowledged that God uses such tools to aid the church but warned that their use must be “guided by the unique nature of humanity and the recognition that machines are fundamentally different from humans.”

The post Lausanne Report: Most Missionaries Are Reaching the Reached appeared first on Christianity Today.

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I love the church, but I can’t say I always understand or even like it. And in my more than half a century inside it, I can’t remember a time when the American church seemed less clear about its identity and purpose.

The Lord decreed love as our signature characteristic (John 13:35), yet Christians have earned a reputation for hatefulness and even raunchiness. From our epidemic of leadership failures to the steady hemorrhaging of the disillusioned, it feels as if we’ve lost our moorings.

“It is an age of very great spiritual derangement and moral dissolution,” the Scottish preacher and theologian P. T. Forsyth shrewdly observed in his time. “The peril of the hour,” he believed in his time, was “a religious subjectiveness which is gliding down into a religious decadence.”

Forsyth wrote these words over a century ago, just before World War I, when modernist theologians were severely eroding trust in the Bible and orthodox traditionalists hunkered down in rigid defensiveness to stem the tide. Like today, the church of Forsyth’s time found itself in crisis and severely divided—and he felt a burden to help it recenter and regain its bearings.

“No religion can survive which does not know where it is,” Forsyth mused. “And current religion does not know where it is, and it hates to be made to ask.”

I first picked up his slim volume The Cruciality of the Cross back in seminary. And for more than two decades of pastoring, I’ve leaned heavily on Forsyth’s teaching to navigate a path across the treacherous terrain of cultural change, political division, and the ethical complexities of our technological world.

The core of his message to a beleaguered church is straightforward: Center on the Cross of Christ. That’s it. Forsyth’s writing unapologetically calls us back to our source of grace and meaning. Like the apostle Paul, he determined to know nothing but “Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2).

But let’s all be honest: That’s not our natural go-to for addressing our most pressing concerns. Placing the Cross at the center of our faith and daily lives might sound either (1) incredibly basic and too obvious to highlight or (2) narrow and imbalanced, elevating the death of Christ over his life. And it certainly doesn’t strike us as the cure for what ails the church today.

Yet Forsyth was insistent. “Christ’s supreme eternal work is in His cross,” he wrote, “which contains, along with the power, the principle which solves the problem of every age.”

Forsyth was neither simplistic nor myopic in calling us back to Calvary. Far from merely tacking “Jesus died for our sins” to the end of every sermon, he went much deeper into the everyday implications of the Cross, which alone anchors us to God’s action as opposed to our own.

“It is the Gospel of the achieved more than the call to achieve,” he declared. “It bids us not to make, so much as to rest in something we find made.”

“To rest in something we find made” requires us to stop trying to manufacture it for ourselves. Truly nothing else has the capacity to unburden our spirits more than the thoroughness and finality of Jesus’ words on the cross: “It is finished.”

Yet how easily we relegate Christ’s death and resurrection to the margins, even in our efforts to serve him. Too often, we treat the Cross as merely the starting point for our faith journey—but then we take over the reins, striving for a sense of control over our spiritual growth and seeing our efforts as a supplement to Christ’s work.

“The Kingdom as a reality exists outside of us since Christ finished His work of establishing it,” Forsyth observed. “And it makes a great difference in the agents of the Kingdom whether they think they are making it or bringing in what is already made.”

It is easy to lose sight of that distinction. Back in seminary, one of my theology professors asked everyone in the class why we were there. One aspiring pastor replied, “I just want to breathe a little life into the Word.” As if the God-breathed text needed his CPR to save it! That student articulated blatantly what we all do in more subtle ways whenever we overestimate the value of our contribution—inserting our endeavors in a place that belongs to God alone.

We may accept the Cross as the crucial center of the Christian faith in theory, but what does that look like on a practical level? How exactly does it change the way we approach the very real challenges facing the church today and keep us from the “religious decadence” Forsyth decried?

First, it calls us to read and interpret Scripture through a relentlessly cruciform lens. Since Jesus was the “Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world” (Rev. 13:8), the gospel itself existed prior to the Bible being written—it was action before it became words. That eternal truth enabled Jesus to show the disciples on the road to Emmaus how the entire Old Testament pointed specifically to him (Luke 24:27).

If the Cross came first in a “superhistoric” sense (as Forsyth would phrase it), then Scripture itself serves that gospel. The written word derives its true authority and unity through the way it bears witness to Christ and his work. Forsyth pointed out that “The Bible is not a compendium of facts, historic or theological, but the channel of redeeming grace.”

This principle serves as a litmus test for our own interpretation of Scripture. No matter the text, I try to begin my study with the question, What does this passage show me of redemption? How does this take me to the Cross? Instead of merely hunting for a life application or broad spiritual theme of a passage, I seek to be attentive to the very presence of Christ.

Some texts remain stubbornly opaque, but more often than not, I find myself surprised by fresh encounters with the living Christ that leap off the page and show me anew the vast dimensions of God’s love. Without fail, this posture—approaching Scripture with the Cross in mind—drastically alters my assumptions about a text. And it filters out many of my competing ideologies that might otherwise hijack the Scripture for their own ends.

Author and pastor Rich Villodas recently summed up this idea well: “Unless we read Scripture through the lens of the crucified Christ, with others, our exegesis is dangerously subject to personal preferences and political allegiances.”

A Cross-centered theology also recasts the way we think about the deep divides polarizing our culture and churches today. As Billy Graham once stated, “the ground is level at the foot of the cross” because it puts everyone on equal standing in our shared need for redemption.

There are nuances in every debate raging today, requiring us to hold certain truths in tension, and we find no better space for doing that than the Cross. Think of the paradoxes of our faith that sit unflinchingly side by side there: The giver of life facing death. Perfection becoming sin. Exclusive holiness offering inclusive love. The judge personally bearing all judgment.

The more attuned I am to the enormity of Christ’s mercy toward me, the more humbled I am and the more room I allow others to receive the same mercy. The Cross of Calvary demands a continual mindset of reconciliation and readiness to forgive as Christ has forgiven us (Eph. 4:32).

What’s more, as we grow in our appreciation of the Cross, it changes the way we experience and make sense of our own suffering. Reflecting on Jesus’ agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, Forsyth noted, “It is a greater thing to pray for pain’s conversion than for its removal. It is more of [a] grace to pray that God would make a sacrament of it.”

When I was walking through my own deep valley of mental and emotional anguish, I first came across those words, and they became a balm for my weary heart and mind. Rather than simply asking God to eradicate my pain (as I had been doing), I began to view the pain itself as a vehicle for meeting the one who understands my suffering better than anyone.

The crucified Jesus personifies the love and character of God in ways we don’t find anywhere else. His death is a rugged, shocking display of his glory. In his physical body on the cross, the entire spectrum of human experience is given voice.

As theologian Jürgen Moltmann, author of The Crucified God, once wrote, “It can be summed up by saying that suffering is overcome by suffering, and wounds are healed by wounds. … Therefore the suffering of abandonment is overcome by the suffering of love, which is not afraid of what is sick and ugly, but accepts it and takes it to itself in order to heal it.”

Christ’s death says all the horrors of this broken world deeply matter to God. We matter to God, to an infinite degree. And isn’t that what everyone longs to know for certain—that we matter?

At the Cross, all our uncertainties and hurts, our questions and feelings, our hatred and judgment, our longings and fears—all of it is converted into prayer. All of it. The Cross is where Christ uplifts humanity’s aching plea, “Why have you forsaken me?” and prays it on our behalf until it gives way to the complete trust of his final words, “Into your hands I commit my Spirit.”

Forsyth understood that the death and resurrection of Jesus didn’t just address human sin but also all the suffering produced by the Fall. It’s this prophetic insight that has repeatedly drawn me to him as an author, and through him to Christ himself.

One of Forsyth’s biographies bears the Latin title Per Crucem Ad Lucem—through the Cross to the light. That was his endless pursuit. “We must clear and lighten the Gospel for action,” he wrote. “We must scrape off the barnacles that reduce its speed.”

More than a century later, P. T. Forsyth’s work continues to do just that. And if we let them, his words provide a trustworthy compass for a church eager to refocus on its true north.

J. D. Peabody is the founding pastor of New Day Church in Federal Way, Washington. He is the author of Perfectly Suited: The Armor of God for the Anxious Mind.

The post The Cross in an Age of ‘Spiritual Derangement’ appeared first on Christianity Today.

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On a recent Sunday morning, Gateway Church, one of the largest nondenominational megachurches in the United States, sprang to life.

Golf carts ferried people from distant parking spaces to the front door. The airport-terminal-sized campus in Southlake, just outside of Dallas, filled with people.

They purchased coffees from the café in the lobby, and children played in the two-story indoor playground. In the service, cameras on booms dipped to grab shots over the crowd as the worship band led the congregation in Gateway Worship’s top single, “Who Else.”

They sang out, “Who else is worthy? Who else is worthy? There is no one, only You, Jesus.”

The words that are universally true for Christians may seem especially true in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, as the area is called, which has seen a string of at least eight pastors step down from megachurches in the past few months over moral failings, mostly sexual in nature. The leaders oversee at least 50,000 in-person churchgoers.

In June, Gateway’s founder and senior pastor, Robert Morris, resigned following a report of his repeatedly molesting a 12-year-old in the 1980s. Other Gateway leaders have also left in the aftermath, including Morris’s son James Morris, who was planning to succeed his father as leader of the megachurch.

The week of this particular worship service, there was more fallout: Gateway asked another one of its executive pastors, Kemtal Glasgow, to resign after an undisclosed “moral failing” that the church said was not related to Morris’s alleged abuse.

The eight departed pastors include prominent names like Morris and popular preacher and Bible study author Tony Evans, and in three other cases, pastors were arrested for sexual crimes. The size of the churches magnifies the damage to local congregants, North Texas churchgoers told CT, and the series of failings hangs over everyday conversations about church.

Attendees were hesitant to go on the record, but several told CT how they felt hurt, angry, and unsure whether to stay at their churches. Meanwhile, remaining pastors, some of whom CT interviewed, were angry and shocked themselves. They sought to counsel distraught congregants, fill the leadership voids, navigate communicating developments in investigations, and figure out how to restore trust between churchgoers and church leaders.

Megachurches often describe themselves as a “refuge” from bad church experiences, according to Hartford Institute for Religion Research director Scott Thumma, who has researched megachurches for decades. The founder of the Vineyard movement, John Wimber, described his church as “a second-marriage church” of “refugees from various religious systems.”

On this Sunday morning in late August, Gateway acknowledged that the thousands of worshipers might be upset, triggered, and questioning whether to leave the church or even their faith.

In early August, Gateway entered 40 days of prayer and fasting, including praying for anyone “wounded by any form of abuse … that God would bring his comfort.” Author and pastor Max Lucado has taken over as the interim pastor of Gateway, although he remains a preaching pastor at his longtime church in San Antonio, Oak Hills Church. On Sunday at Gateway, he prayed for the congregation processing abuse from its leadership.

“Do not allow the evil one to lead anyone away,” he prayed. “Protect that precious heart that is already fragile … protect these young people … protect those souls who have been triggered, whose memories have been stirred. May they hear you say, ‘I am with you, I am with you to the end of the age.’”

“I beg your blessing on the metroplex,” he added, praying against the “principalities and powers” that have “darkened the clouds over this region.”

The list of local churches with leaders failing over the summer is long.

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In June, Evans resigned from the megachurch he founded, Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship, after admitting to an undisclosed sin.

“While I have committed no crime, I did not use righteous judgment in my actions,” he told Oak Cliff. Since his resignation, Evans has not shared further details of what happened.

Stonebriar Community Church, founded by Chuck Swindoll, fired one of its longtime associate pastors in July after an undisclosed “moral failure.”

Three other pastors of large churches were arrested. The senior pastor of North Dallas Community Bible Fellowship, Terren Dames, was arrested in May for soliciting a prostitute, and the church fired him. The founding pastor of Koinonia Christian Church, Ronnie Goines, was arrested for sexual assault in late July. Lakeside Baptist Church’s youth pastor, Luke Cunningham, was arrested and charged with sexually assaulting a child after church leaders learned he had been accused of abuse at a previous church and reported him to police.

In late July, Josiah Anthony, lead pastor of the megachurch Cross Timbers Church, resigned for actions that were “inappropriate and hurtful” to church staff, elders of the megachurch said in a statement. They later added that they learned he had a pattern of inappropriate communication—sometimes sexual—with women in the church and on staff.

Executive pastor Byron Copeland took over as interim lead pastor at Cross Timbers but then, a few weeks later, he abruptly resigned. Copeland was a former pastor at Gateway, and a staffer there had previously accused him of pressuring her to drop her complaints of a hostile work environment under a different pastor.

It feels like an avalanche to Dallas churchgoers.

“It’s strangely localized and time-bound. I don’t know how to account for that,” said Rob Collingsworth at Criswell College in Dallas, who is plugged into Baptist church circles through his work with the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention. The churches involved in these scandals are either nondenominational or part of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Some locals have talked about the rapid spate of pastor removals as a spiritual attack, but Collingsworth said that could lead to the perception that victims reporting abuses are the source of the evil. He sees the cascade of events as a “righteous pulling back of the curtain. … [Would we] be better off with Robert Morris still in the pulpit?”

Still, Collingsworth knows that these pastoral failings could shake faith in the church as an institution. He and his wife have friends at Gateway who are considering finding a new church, but the friends don’t know where to go because they “don’t know who to trust.”

Because megachurches are such a feature of evangelicalism in Dallas, with their massive campuses visible when driving around many parts of the city, a crisis can affect a large segment of the Christian community. It’s like if Ford has a crisis in Detroit, “everybody is affected,” said Dustin Messer, the vicar of All Saints Dallas, an Anglican congregation downtown.

“We get folks coming from other churches who have been wounded,” he said. “Every week.”

For the fall, All Saints is planning a course for people who are coming to their church from church hurt.

“This is happening at a high tide of institutional distrust in American culture, anyway, and a low tide of measured social capital,” said Nathaniel Strenger, a psychologist in Dallas who has a theology degree from Fuller Theological Seminary. When people are detaching from churches because they don’t feel safe, he added, “you’ve got more and more isolated individuals.” Then those individuals turn to mental health professionals for emotional support instead of their churches, he said.

One local megachurch pastor who wished not to be named, to protect the privacy of people coming to his church, said his church had received “hurt people” from these other churches after the crises.

“They are a little more skeptical about me, the leadership at our church, than they were before,” he said. “And I don’t blame them a bit.”

The pastor also said he felt like everyone had some culpability for a church culture that embraces leaders who are focused on “fame instead of faithfulness. … It’s setting people up for failure.”

After the lead pastor of Cross Timbers resigned, Toby Slough, the founding pastor, came back to the church to preach. He thanked the people who had the “courage … grace and integrity” to bring their concerns to the elders about the pastor: “I know that wasn’t easy.”

Slough acknowledged that the congregation was probably feeling sadness, shock, and anger. He said he was sad too.

“I’m grateful the Lord is near to the brokenhearted, aren’t you?” he said. “My prayer is that we would let unchanging truth be our guiding light, even when it doesn’t feel that way.”

And he said he understood the tendency to want to find another place to go to church.

“That would be easier,” he said. “I’m just asking you to hang with us in the months ahead. … We’re not going to act like this didn’t happen and move on. We’re going to give everybody time to grieve.” He read from Lamentations 3: “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed.”

While the fallout for congregations is significant—not to mention those directly mistreated and abused—churchgoers said they often feel relationally distant from the big personalities leading their churches.

Jim Denison was the senior pastor of Park Cities Baptist Church, a Dallas megachurch of about 10,000, until he left in 2009. He referred to himself as a “face up on the screen” and compared it to being a mayor of a small town or a president of a university.

The congregation didn’t have a close relationship with him, and he feels that, at some level, these senior pastors are replaceable.

And Dallas megachurches operate like large businesses, said Denison, who now leads the Denison Forum in Dallas. He sees church responses, which often include quick resignations and little explanation, as “fiduciary protection of the institution.”

“Dallas is only here because of banking during the frontier era and now oil,” he said. “It’s a very business-centric sort of context. As a result, everything is run in a business sense.”

That means these churches have resources and a sort of professionalism when it comes to dealing with a crisis. That could be used to cover up wrongdoing to protect the institution, but it also could be an asset, Denison said.

But when allegations are revealed in a slow drip, or multiple staff have moral failings, that creates a trust issue that “snowballs so fast,” he added.

When Denison was a megachurch pastor, his church discovered a staff member had embezzled a large sum of money, he said. Within a day, the church had a forensic accountant on the scene, a meeting with trustees and the finance committee, and a game plan. The church had a $14 million budget and a large staff, so it could handle the situation as a large business would.

“I was so grateful for the business sense that they brought, in terms of how to manage this crisis,” he said. “They realized far before I did that what we really would have would be a crisis of confidence. Can the church members trust us with their money?”

He said by “God’s grace” that attendance and giving didn’t drop as a result. But the church leadership also realized they couldn’t let it happen again.

“We had to bring in all new [financial] controls, and pray and ask God to keep us from having another failure in the same direction,” he said. “The mistake churches often make is they promise the same people will do it differently this time. … You have to bring in a different set of people who already bring their credibility into the room.”

But there’s a balance: Denison thinks that megachurches must do a better job of making sure a business culture doesn’t overwhelm a ministry culture, and that they have pastors who can keep the focus on the life of the church.

The bottom line is that the way a megachurch handles a crisis matters, and a congregation could respond with more unity after a crisis rather than with distrust.

Lakeside Baptist Church has about 1,400 in attendance on a Sunday, a little smaller than the 2,000 that researchers consider a megachurch. The news of abuse allegations against Lakeside’s youth pastor “blindsided” the church staff, said Malcolm Yarnell, a teaching pastor there and a professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

“It was, to say the least, the most difficult month or two of any of the church staff’s experience,” Yarnell said. The church is a member of MinistrySafe, an abuse prevention training program, but Yarnell said they are planning to beef up their policies. The church also stated that if the SBC had a working database for abuse offenders, “we would likely have never been exposed to Mr. Cunningham.”

The Sunday after alerting police about Cunningham, Lakeside gave a report to the congregation on what happened. A few days later, leaders met with youth and their parents.

They had pastors and professional counselors present to answer questions and talk through trauma, related to this incident or not. Yarnell said the response was positive, even though everyone was shocked.

It helped that Cunningham’s alleged crime happened at another church, and no one had reported abuse at Lakeside. But Yarnell said the church would be prepared to address that openly if it did come up.

“What hurts the congregation is when the church leadership doesn’t come forward and put everything on the table,” said Yarnell. “Healing begins with the truth. It cannot begin any other way than with the truth. … True pastors must protect the flock even at cost to their own lives.”

The post Deep in the Heart of Megachurch Country, Dallas Mourns a Summer of Pastor Scandals appeared first on Christianity Today.

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I’ve been in the pro-life movement for 40 years. My wife founded the Austin Crisis Pregnancy Center (ACPC) in 1984 and later chaired the national umbrella group for such centers, Care Net. I chaired the ACPC for a while and later chaired meetings of pro-life leaders in Washington, DC.

We’ve also personally helped unmarried women unhappily surprised by pregnancy. One lived with us for nine months, during which time she gave birth. Another got married in our living room and also gave birth, although happily not in our living room. In 1988, 1992, 2021, and 2023, I produced four pro-life books on the history of abortion.

That personal history is why I don’t lightly say that much of the pro-life movement has lost its way. First Things recently opined, “Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was a great victory for the pro-life cause.” No, it wasn’t: The number of abortions is apparently rising. Dobbs was a great opportunity for the pro-life movement to show our recognition that unwanted pregnancies are hard.

They are especially hard the small percentage of the time that rape or incest are involved, but they are hard all the time. A truly compassionate pro-life perspective shows that children need protection and their parents need support. But instead of emphasizing both, some politicians have talked so tough that it seemed pro-lifers might treat miscarriages as crime scenes.

Many pro-lifers failed to understand the mourning on the other side: 50 years of reproductive rights down the tubes. Some women had come to believe that the only way they could prosper in our society was through unfettered access to abortion. It was hard for many to imagine how they could flourish without it.

Pro-lifers had an opportunity to help women imagine meaningful lives even with unexpected babies. Our side should have acknowledged that Dobbs was scary to many women. We could have built a movement to support more generous family policies. Instead, many pro-lifers went for force first.

With Dobbs liberating states to legislate as they saw fit, some pro-life advocates competed to see who could back the toughest laws. Some pro-lifers in Oklahoma and elsewhere wanted women who had abortions to be charged with murder. The result was a transformation of popular narrative from concern for the unborn and their mothers to a thirst for power and control.

Some politicians used harsh language and aimed their scorn at abortion-minded women. Specific hard cases cast pro-life activists as hard-hearted. A half-century of pro-life understanding—you can’t save babies unless you love their mothers—evaporated. I sympathize with the desire to win big, but I’m also a reporter willing to acknowledge uncomfortable technological and political realities.

Today’s technological reality is that two-thirds of abortions occur via abortion pills, often ingested at home rather than in abortion centers. Closing down those centers is more and more like shuttering pornography stores rendered irrelevant by streaming services. Stopping pills by law would require opening mail, frisking visitors, and going after senders based in states (like New York and Massachusetts) that offer them legal immunity. Convincing parents, one by one and two by two, not to kill their unborn babies, is more important than ever.

The political reality is of two kinds. The obvious problem is that the identification of pro-life belief with former president Donald Trump and the Republican Party remade in his image has been a public opinion disaster. Some can write off polls as irrelevant when lives are at stake, but Abraham Lincoln wisely said, “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.”

The problem of pledging allegiance to an unethical leader doubled in my state of Texas, where Attorney General Ken Paxton, impeached following allegations of corruption and bribery, is the best-known pro-life spokesman.He fought Kate Cox, then the 31-year-old mother of two who sought an undesired abortion in an exceptionally hard case. Chasing her out of Texas was only a pro-life win in the style of an ancient saying, “One more victory and we are undone.”

The second problem, more complex than individual nastiness, is the denial of the reality that although God does not judge by appearances, most Americans do. The closer unborn children are to birth—the more they look like born children—the more their protection has broad support. Most Americans support abortion early in pregnancy, but only 22 percent nationally support its legality during the third trimester.

Instead of thinking like Lincoln and building off where pro-life support is greatest, some pro-life leaders are campaigning against in vitro fertilization, which produces the very earliest unborn children. The tiny ones deserve protection, but that’s the hardest case to make in terms of public opinion, especially since many couples turn to IVF over their inability to have children otherwise.

The overarching mistake is a default position of compelling rather than convincing. We’ve seen the results of that before. In the early 1990s, after Operation Rescue physically kept women from entering abortion centers, the willingness to identify as “pro-life” cratered in public opinion polls, and the number of US abortions was at an all-time high: 1.6 million.

The meetings of pro-life leaders in Washington that I chaired during that period featured fierce debates and some rethinking. On one side were “all or nothing” advocates. On the other were “all or something” proponents, who supported legislation to protect as many unborn children as possible, given public opinion, but emphasized helping to change hearts.

Many groups came to embrace the all-or-something approach. With technological help through an increased use of ultrasound, with much prayer, with God’s mercy, the number of abortions fell during Bill Clinton’s second term, throughout George Bush’s two terms, and throughout Barack Obama’s two terms.

The number apparently increased during the Trump term. Since the 2022 Dobbs decision, the number of abortions has decreased in some states but has evidently increased overall, with abortion pills leading the way.

That brings us to the current dilemma many pro-life voters face. Donald Trump has now sidelined the pro-life convictions he opportunistically expressed. He returned to his earlier acceptance of abortion and told his Truth Social audience that he favors “reproductive rights.”

And the Democratic Party is no haven for jilted pro-lifers.

While Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in her acceptance speech moved to the center on many questions, she moved to the left on abortion. Much as Dobbs fueled a triumphalism on the pro-life side, seven straight victories on state referenda concerning abortion have excited abortion supporters—and more referenda are on the ballot two months from now. As The New York Times reported, Democrats have “recast Republicans as the party of control and theirs as the party of freedom.”

So the final hard reality is that American pro-lifers do not have a party. But we can still remind both parties of what the Democrats’ 1968 presidential candidate, Hubert Humphrey, said: “The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.”

For Democrats, that will require a reminder of what could have been. Until the Roe decision in 1973, leading Democrats included unborn children within Humphrey’s moral test. When my friend Nellie Gray started in 1974 what began the annual March for Life in Washington, she knocked on the doors of Ted Kennedy and others and initially expected to receive support. They demurred, but at first did so with words like those that became the title of the best book on abortion by a pro-choice writer, Magda Denes’s In Necessity and Sorrow.

Democrats did not always link abortion with virtue and opportunity. They could return to the Clinton mantra of the 1990s: Instead of seeing abortion as victory, they could defend its legality but work to make it “rare.” If they want to be a “party of freedom,” they could strive to reduce the sense of “necessity.” Part of that means working with pro-life pregnancy resource centers, not harassing them.

For Republicans, many of whom still consider themselves pro-life, a recognition of “sorrow” leads to greater moral sympathy and economic creativity. They should advocate cultural and economic changes that make more women and men feel it possible to have and raise a baby well.

One of my favorite pro-life leaders in American history, Mary Gould Hood, graduated 150 years ago from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. She moved to Minneapolis and became a founding doctor at the Bethany Home for Unwed Mothers. She also practiced at the Chicago Hospital for Women and Children,the first hospital to be staffed by female physicians an all-woman board of 50 directors.

Hood and many other late-19th century pro-life doctors, including Elizabeth Blackwell, Rachel Brooks Gleason, Alice Bunker Stockham, Prudence Saur, Jennie Oreman, and Mary Melendy, labored for decades to do exactly what we need to do now: show how it’s possible to have and raise a baby well, whether the mother is married (a great positive) or not.

Hood eventually moved to Boston and joined the executive committees of New England Baptist Hospital and Vincent Memorial Hospital. She culminated her 40 years in pro-life work by publishing in 1914 For Girls and the Mothers of Girls: A Book for the Home and the School Concerning the Beginnings of Life.

“What experience can be more sacred, or more marvelous, than that of the mother who understands that a new human has begun within her,” she wrote. “Motherhood brings with it cares and responsibilities, but it also brings the greatest of earthly joys.”

That’s what today’s pro-life movement needs to convey, not by might but by light that can illuminate an inner and outer glow.

Marvin Olasky is a writer and columnist for the Discovery Institute and Religion Unplugged. He is also the co-author of The Story of Abortion in America: A Street-Level History, 1652–2022.

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I always assumed my sons would go to college. My husband and I were indelibly formed by our own college years of deep reading, endless discussion, and applying what we’d learned in the classroom to our faith and the world. University life helped us grow toward being “as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16), renewed for the service of God (Rom. 12:2). I expected my children would begin adulthood the same way.

But in his junior year of high school, our oldest son announced his plan to work in the trades. It caught me off guard, and my husband and I needed more than a few discussions to come around. My husband is the first member of his immediate family to have earned a college degree. After one generation, I thought, were we already going backward?

Our son didn’t see his decision that way. Being at home during the pandemic had meant seeing his parents working on their computers while he did school on his, and the experience made him rethink college.

The more we talked, it became clear that he was serious—and so were his plans. That year, he worked with a professional carpenter to build docks for his rowing team. The next summer, he started working for a local renovation company where, three years later, he’s a full-time carpenter himself. By the time our younger son made the same announcement as a high school sophomore, we rolled with it.

So I’ve become the mother of two members of what The Wall Street Journal dubbed the “toolbelt generation,” and I’ve come to see why this path makes sense for Gen Z. Lately, it’s seemed like all the news about college has been negative: The price tag is too high. Graduates leave with debt it’ll take decades to repay—and they might not even find a job in their field of study. Enrollment is declining. Many of the kids who are in school aren’t sure why. And many campuses have been hijacked by over-politicized rhetoric, if not outright violence.

In that context, it’s unsurprising that more and more high school graduates are deciding the university is not for them. But what about the spiritual needs of young people going into the trades? While skilled labor itself can be spiritually and morally formational, my sons want Christian discipleship that acknowledges the importance of their vocational path—and I believe churches need to meet the unique spiritual needs of this growing population in their congregations.

My younger son plans to do HVAC work for at least a year, but he may still go to college because he wants to go to seminary someday. We’ve started looking into schools that offer some sort of liberal arts education alongside training in the trades, and we’ve learned that Christian options are multiplying.

In fact, as Nathaniel Marshall—a plumber by trade who writes on Substack at The Blue Scholar—has detailed, there’s a new wealth of Christian trades programs. Marshall maintains a list of high school and post–high school educational options, many of which come with the promise that by the time a student graduates, they will have learned how to think, paid back some or all of their minimal debt, and settled in a full-time job where they earn a living wage. Some of these schools are so new that they have their first cohort of students this coming fall or even next year.

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That pairing of a liberal arts education in a Christian worldview with trades training or a heavy work-study program makes sense because, as Marshall argues, “blue collar work is not just the work of bodies: It is the work of whole persons.” It is, or at least can be, work “that recruits and forms my interior world,” “that orders the physical and social architecture around me,” “that has the potential to make me a better person by its dutiful practice,” and “that places me in God’s presence such that my work becomes prayer.”

One school on Marshall’s list particularly caught our attention for our younger son: the College of Saint Joseph the Worker in Steubenville, Ohio. Its founder, Jacob Imam, believes that study of our faith and skilled labor are meant to be joined. “A deep love of study and work emerged from the heart of the Church; from the person of Jesus, the Word become carpenter,” he wrote this summer. “Our society cannot enjoy the goods of Christ without Christ himself.”

But what about our oldest, who’s still disinclined to pursue any higher education? My husband and I don’t want him to miss the spiritual formation that college offered us as young adults. We want him to “be transformed by the renewing of [his] mind,” and to “be able to test and approve what God’s … good, pleasing and perfect will” is (Rom. 12:2). Could this happen without college?

“The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake,” author Matthew B. Crawfordsaid in a 2009 New York Times essay: “Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid.”

To an extent, I’ve realized my question about spiritual formation outside of college is based in the same kind of mistake. I need to repent of being an education snob.

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My oldest son is developing critical thinking in a community of like-minded people even though he’s not reading and discussing great literature or philosophy or history in the classroom. He’s renewing his mind while integrating his body in his work, and perhaps this is part of what it means to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice” (Rom. 12:1). He isn’t discussing books with his coworkers, but they are having what Crawford calls “a sort of conversation in deed.”

As Marshall writes, such skilled labor “has the distinct capacity for integrating your entire being; its dutiful practice can (and will) train your morals, emotions, and intellect along with your senses and spirit; it makes you a dependable member of your family and wider community.”

A certain intelligence is born from paying close attention while doing work alongside others. Whether or not he can articulate it now, my son is learning to solve problems as he builds stairs, lays tile, and makes repairs both adeptly and efficiently. My son’s work community shows him the beauty of a neatly framed window. He learns the necessity of taking care—perhaps especially when he’s required to redo a task done wrong the first time. In many ways, his work helps him grow “in wisdom and stature” (Luke 2:52).

Yet for all that, my concern about spiritual formation is not only educational snobbery, and Marshall’s vision of skilled work as a source of spiritual training may be an illusion if trades workers are left to figure it out alone, outside of Christian community. Unfortunately, churches full of people who assume—as I once did—that college is the default after high school may find it all too easy to overlook the toolbelt generation in favor of college-oriented ministry.

Growing from small tykes until they graduated high school, our sons received teaching and mentorship in our church’s children’s ministry program and youth group. But since he became a bona fide adult in the workforce, our oldest hasn’t had the same dedicated support. He found he didn’t fit into the church’s “college-aged” bucket because he wasn’t in school. Young adults who don’t go to college, who live on their own and support themselves, navigate the world and their faith very differently from their student peers.

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Thankfully, our oldest stumbled into the community he needed in one of our church’s small groups made up of 25- to 30-somethings. Though he’s younger than the rest, they quickly pulled him in for the kind of discipleship and mentorship, even friendship, we’d been praying he’d find. Congregations with Zoomers entering the trades should intentionally pursue this model for discipling a cohort of young people who otherwise might drift out of a church that seems to have no place for them.

As Gen Z increasingly takes up the toolbelt over the textbook, the church must be ready for that shift. While there’s potential for healthy formation in our oldest son’s work community, our prayer is that he will remain connected to the body of Christ. He needs not just skills and knowledge but the knowledge that comes from the love of God (1 Cor. 8:1–2). He needs a distinctly Christian community to speak into his life and work. He needs the church.

Jen Hemphill is a writer from Pittsburgh finishing up a memoir about rock climbing and motherhood. She writes at Pull-ups in the Basement on Substack.

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Nearly five years after a German pastor sparked controversy with comments about homosexuality, the legal dispute appears to be over with a settlement of 5,000 euros (about $5,550 USD).

Olaf Latzel, pastor of a conservative congregation in the state-privileged Protestant Church, called homosexuality “degenerative” and “demonic.” He condemned what he called the “hobbylobby” and slammed “these criminals” at a Berlin LGBTQ pride celebration, “running around everywhere.” Latzel made the comments during a 2019 marriage seminar. Only about 30 couples attended, but the seminar was later shared on YouTube.

He was charged with incitement of hate against a people group and found guilty in 2020 in the Bremen District Court. Latzel was ordered to pay a fine of 90 euros per day for 90 days—the equivalent of nearly $9,000 USD.

Latzel appealed and won in regional court. The judge ruled that, while offensive, the pastor’s comments were nonetheless protected by the constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion and freedom of expression.

Prosecutors appealed that decision, and, in February 2023, the Higher Regional Court deemed the case “incomplete” and sent it back to Bremen.

Now, the Bremen Regional Court has suspended the proceedings, with one condition: The pastor must give 5,000 euros to the nonprofit Rat & Tat-Zentrum für Queeres Leben (Advice and Action Center for Queer Life) in Bremen.

Latzel has six months to transfer the funds. With that, the case against him will be dropped completely.

In court in August, Latzel apologized in a statement, admitting grave mistakes while at the same time saying he had been misunderstood. He said he “made statements that hurt people” and distanced himself from what he called a “linguistic slip-up that should not have happened.”

Latzel has previously said he condemns homosexuality based on his interpretation of the Bible but has nothing against LGBTQ people.

The judge said she found Latzel’s apology “authentic.” Frauke Wesemüller noted that the pastor’s words were “not good” but offered no ruling of the legal questions of whether the remarks in the marriage seminar violated human dignity or were inflammatory. Defining criminal insults to human dignity is “controversial among jurists,” the judge said.

Latzel—who had intimated he was willing to appeal a guilty verdict, taking the case all the way to the German Federal Constitutional Court—has agreed to pay the money. He told German reporters he was “grateful” for the outcome but did not want to comment further.

This is not the first time Latzel’s words have landed him in hot water. In 2015, he was investigated for comments about Buddhists, Catholics, and Muslims.

Latzel may also face discipline from Protestant authorities. The regional body of the church, where Latzel has served as a pastor since 2007, initiated disciplinary proceedings in 2020, but put them on hold pending the outcome of the criminal case. Church officials said in a statement that leadership will respond to the court decision “promptly,” once the case is formally closed.

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If you feel like it’s hard to keep up with the cascade of new worship music, you’re not alone. The industry is producing new releases at a quicker clip, and the typical lifespan of a worship song—the time a song remains in regular rotation for church worship teams—has shortened.

Faced with a seemingly endless supply of new music, worship leaders are looking for ways to incorporate new music without skipping over the process of discerning whether the style and message of a particular song is right for their church.

For some, the ecumenicism of contemporary worship music is both a strength and a weakness, and they fear that not enough has been done to make sure that musical worship within their churches still reflects the theological commitments that bind them to a historical or denominational strand of Christianity.

Denominations are stepping in to help by offering new resources as guidance, or, in the case of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), holding on to their old ones. Last year, the SBC’s Lifeway Worship scrapped plans to shut down its online media database after an outcry from church musicians who trusted the site’s musical offerings.

“Leaders rely on us to provide some guardrails,” Brian Brown, director of Lifeway Worship, told CT. “If it’s been vetted by Lifeway, they have an added layer of confidence.”

Lifeway’s online resource isn’t as tech-forward but functions similarly to SongSelect, the popular Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI) platform, and PraiseCharts. CCLI was formed to offer churches protection from copyright litigation, and PraiseCharts was founded by a worship pastor who wanted to create an alternative to mail-order music for church musicians, so they could have quicker access to arrangements of new worship songs like “Shout to the Lord.”

As the ecumenical digital songbook of new worship music has grown, the influence that denominations used to exert through their curated hymnals has weakened. Some leaders are concerned that the dominance of popular music produced by a handful of megachurches and artists—think Hillsong, Bethel, and Elevation—is washing away some of the elements of musical worship that reflect the doctrines and historical practices of their traditions.

In 2015, the United Methodist Church (UMC) launched its CCLI Top 100 Project, which resulted in “green” and “yellow” lists of popular songs and a set of downloadable criteria. Nelson Cowan, who now oversees the project, told CT in 2021 that sung doctrine is more than just an affirmation of the “right” words, “it’s doctrine we are learning and inhabiting and feeling and processing through song.”

Last year, the Association of Lutheran Church Musicians (ALCM) released its first list of vetted songs from the CCLI Top 100 list in its journal CrossAccent. Clayton Faulkner, dean of the chapel at Wartburg Theological Seminary and editor of CrossAccent, oversaw the pan-Lutheran vetting project.

“Theology was the main focus,” Faulkner told CT. “If a song isn’t theologically sound, it doesn’t matter if it’s singable.”

Faulkner and his team adapted the UMC’s criteria to reflect a Lutheran theological lens, emphasizing the centrality of the Trinity, sacramentalism, and liturgical time. Previously, Sundays and Seasons, an online and print resource for Lutheran churches, had suggested songs based on the liturgical calendar that aligned with Lutheran doctrine, but there was no centralized collection of evaluated contemporary songs.

Earlier this year, the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC) released its CCLI Vetting Project. Historically, the singing of Scripture has been central in the Reformed tradition, stretching back to Calvin’s preference for unaccompanied metered psalms, unencumbered by ornamentation and focused solely on the singing of Scripture.

“The Christian Reformed tradition has a history of being theologically mindful about what we sing,” said Katie Ritsema-Roelofs, who led the CRC project. “The denomination started with psalm-singing, and that deeply informs how we think about congregational singing.”

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How Bethel and Hillsong Took Over Our Worship SetsBob Smietana – Religion News Service

Keith Getty, cowriter of the popular song “In Christ Alone,” grew up singing metrical psalms in his Irish Presbyterian church. Getty has persistently spoken about the need for greater attention to theological depth and care in the writing of contemporary worship music.

He and his wife, Kristyn, emphasize “modern hymns” and are in the process of producing a hymnal with Crossway, scheduled to be released next year.

For this year’s annual Sing! conference, hosted by Getty Music in Nashville, the Gettys selected the theme “The Songs of the Bible,” reflecting their ongoing commitment to cultivating the practice of singing Scripture-focused music within the modern worship landscape.

“God is hugely concerned with what we sing,” Keith Getty told CT. “God has made us to understand him through what we sing.”

Kristyn Getty sees a return to a more Bible-centered mode of congregational singing as a way out of worship war skirmishes and conflicts over trends.

“Singing Scripture is a timeless call on our lives, throughout generations. To sing Scripture is to sing lyrics that have been around for thousands of years, not written in America or Europe. It’s a way to lift our song beyond the moment, toward something more timeless.”

The Gettys aren’t the only prominent figures in the contemporary praise and worship scene advocating for renewed attention to theological content in song lyrics.

Songwriter and worship artist Matt Redman recently wrote for CT that church musicians need input from pastors and theologians to enrich the worship of their congregations. Redman will appear alongside other songwriters and theologians at the upcoming WOR/TH conferences—convenings that aim to cultivate cooperation between artists and theologians. The responsibility of overseeing the singing of doctrine, he says, is too great for one person:

Many of us, myself included, admit we need assistance in that area. We likely didn’t come into this via seminary or intense theological training; we came in through the avenue of loving music and being able to play or sing.

We humbly recognize we cannot do this on our own. We need help from thinkers, theologians, and pastors. We need to be sharpened by fellow songwriters and worship leaders too.

Redman and the Gettys see a need to reanimate the global church’s commitment to singing songs with theological depth.

Neither Redman nor the Gettys write music for a particular Christian denomination; their songs are among the most widely sung contemporary songs in the global church, and their ecumenical appeal is what makes them so popular and powerful.

But some denominational leaders fear that there is a downside to primarily singing music that is theologically general enough to be sung by Baptists, Lutherans, Mennonites, Methodists, and Pentecostals. Vetting existing music isn’t enough to correct what they see as doctrinal vagueness; they want to instead support the creation of new music within their traditions.

In 2020, a group of songwriters and creatives in the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) gathered to write new songs that more explicitly reflect the denomination’s commitment to missions and the global church.

Alliance Worship grew out of that gathering and continues to write, record, and release new music, including “Yesterday, Today, and Forevermore,” a reimagined version of the hymn “Yesterday, Today, Forever,” by the CMA’s founder, A. B. Simpson.

“There are thousands of worship songs being released every year that are nebulous, kind of a catchall,” Tim Meier, vice president for development at the CMA, told CT in 2023. “What would it look like to sing our theology again?”

Most of the individuals involved in vetting projects find a lot to love about popular worship music and recognize that many of their congregants have developed deep spiritual and emotional ties to particular songs, even songs that might have a theologically murky line or two. Ritsema-Roelofs pointed out that the hymn “I’ll Fly Away” doesn’t reflect a particularly Reformed view of heaven, but it holds a special power and taps into something for some (especially older) congregants that is more than just nostalgia and sentimentality.

“I’ve served in congregations where they sing a song with questionable or poor theology, but it’s a heart song,” said Ritsema-Roelofs. “Pastorally, you can’t take that away. There is soul work that happens when people sing a heart song, and it’s deeper than just making us feel good.”

In the list of CRC-vetted songs, the team includes notes about their strengths and “opportunities” (generally, for improvement or adaptation) and potential liturgical uses.

There are a few songs that get the equivalent of a warning label, such as Charity Gayle’s “I Speak Jesus,” for its “concerning association of depression with spiritual warfare” and treatment of Jesus’ name as an “incantation,” and Bethel Music’s “Raise a Hallelujah,” for its “overemphasis on human agency and human responsibility.”

Even though there are songs that get a “red light” from the CRC’s vetting team, the list isn’t meant to be a set of rules. Ritsema-Roelofs says she hopes that the list and the principles used to compile it will serve a denomination that already has a history of prioritizing the careful selection of congregational songs.

“We talk a lot about ‘song diet,’” said Ritsema-Roelofs. “Is the diet of songs in the church balanced? Are you singing psalms? Are you singing Scripture? Are you singing laments? Are you playing favorites with the members of the Trinity?”

One concern articulated by the CRC team was that the amount of individualistic language in popular worship songs is out of balance.

“When our primary language week after week is individualistic, it gradually forms us to contain worship to MY service, MY relationship with God, MY, MY, MY,” they wrote in an introductory note. “When we worship corporately we experience both the joy and the responsibility of living in community.”

In addition, the vetting team noted that popular songs tend to be songs of praise and celebration—an important part of any balanced song diet for a body of believers—and that making space for songs of lament will require intention and effort. “A continual barrage of ‘Be happy—God’s got this!’ minimizes pain and presents a problematic long-term understanding of God’s presence or absence in human suffering,” they wrote.

Despite different theological lenses and priorities, the vetting teams from both the CRC and the ALCM categorized the songs “Raise a Hallelujah” and “Battle Belongs” (by Phil Wickham) as “not recommended” or in the “red light” category.

Both groups noted the triumphalism in each song, as well as the use of battle/warfare language.

“Much care should be taken when singing about spiritual warfare. It is too easy to slip into making our neighbors our enemies,” the Lutheran team wrote in the comments on “Battle Belongs.”

Although lyrical content is the primary focus of these vetting initiatives, singability and playability are important aspects of song selection, especially in small churches.

“We looked at chord progressions and considered whether they are achievable for amateur musicians,” said Faulkner. “We also thought about whether a song can stand on its own when played and sung with just a piano and voices.”

When questions arise about the ethics of promoting or using the music associated with a particular megachurch or leader involved in a public scandal, local churches are entrusted with those decisions.

“Our goal in this process was not to give a stamp of CRC approval. Our primary goal here was formational,” said Ritsema-Roelofs. “We wanted to help people think about what their congregations are singing, because over time, it forms you. It forms your theology and faith. This was never meant to bring experts into a room to tell people what they should and shouldn’t do.”

As of now, the CRC doesn’t plan to keep vetting every new CCLI Top 100 (which is updated twice a year), nor does the ALCM. The UMC published an updated list of vetted songs in 2024. Alliance Worship will continue to write and record new music for the CMA, and the Gettys will launch the Sing! hymnal next year, offering their “vetted” collection of songs old and new.

Keith Getty says that the process of cultivating a body of theologically rich, musically accessible songs for the church is not a quest for perfection, and that getting lost in the minutiae can mean missing the beauty of the gospel.

“The gospel story is our strength and our song. I would warn against trying to take every single song and make sure it’s right,” he said. “It’s not about getting everything right, it’s about understanding the big picture and getting most of it right.”

The post Should Christians Across Denominations Be Singing the Same Songs? appeared first on Christianity Today.

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Rwanda has shut down almost 10,000 places of worship in the past two months, and now its president has proposed making churches pay taxes on their income.

The country’s crackdown on houses of worship comes as part of an ongoing push to protect Rwandans from church corruption and fraud and to ensure that their buildings meet certain physical standards.

Just weeks after winning his fourth term, President Paul Kagame condemned “mushrooming churches” that “squeeze even the last penny from poor Rwandans.”

“These unscrupulous people who use religion and churches to manipulate and fleece people of their money and other things will force us to introduce a tax,” he said in his first remarks since taking his oath of office on August 11.

The Rwanda Governance Board (RGB), which oversees the country’s places of worship, found that thousands of churches—many of them rural, Pentecostal congregations—failed to meet legal requirements around theological education, building codes, and sanitation regulations.

The RGB delineates between churches, which are officially registered with the government, and “prayer houses,” or places where Christians worship and which exist under churches.

In a statement to CT, the RGB confirmed that it had inspected 14,000 prayer houses in July and closed 70 percent of them “for non-compliance with established regulations including registration, building codes, safety, hygiene/sanitation, and financial or other exploitation of followers.”

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“It should be noted that the closure of a prayer house does not necessarily entail the closure of the church the prayer house is affiliated with,” the statement added.

The board began shutting down houses of worship in July and stated that “relevant authorities will continue to collaborate with religious leaders” to ensure that the legal standards, ranging from degree requirements to garbage cans and parking lots, are met. Places of worship that have been closed can reopen if they demonstrate that the violations have been fixed.

This isn’t the first time Rwanda has taken action against churches for being out of compliance with government regulations. The country closed more than 7,000 churches in 2018 over health, safety, and noise issues. That year, it added further regulations, including banning church leaders from encouraging long fasts and requiring certain financial disclosures from churches and prayer houses.

It also introduced a requirement that each church must have a legal representative who holds a theology degree. Churches had five years, until September 2023, to comply with the law, and after a grace period, the RGB began enforcing the new standard.

Churches registering with the government must submit an organizational chart. Leaders in national positions, as well as those who supervise groups of local churches or regional parishes, must have a university degree with a certificate in theology or a theology degree, according to the board’s former CEO, Usta Kaitesi. (Kaitesi recently left after five years as the RGB’s leader and was replaced on August 16 by Doris Uwicyeza Picard, who formerly worked at the Ministry of Justice.)

Kaitesi emphasized that the education requirement does not apply directly to the leader of each church—a demand that would make it cost-prohibitive for most religious organizations.

“This structure allows the parish pastor to be accountable for what happens at the local church level,” Kaitesi told CT in March. “It doesn’t take our responsibility from the local church pastor, but you want them to know that if this is the doctrine of the church, and the church has told us this is the doctrine, they should have somebody with the capacity for supervising the implementation of the doctrine.”

Kaitesi believes that national umbrella groups—the Protestant Council of Rwanda, the Evangelical Alliance of Rwanda, the Forum of Born Again Churches for Rwanda, and Association of Pentecostal Churches of Rwanda—have a critical role to play in implementation.

“We encourage [all church legal entities] to belong to an umbrella, because we believe that umbrellas can do a lot of self-regulation, more than us doing too much regulation,” she said.

The government’s legal standards have largely worked well for historic denominations.

“What was introduced—not today but five years ago—is good for the church. The government gave us five years to comply and kept giving us reminders. That ended last year in September,” Anglican Archbishop Laurent Mbanda of Rwanda told Religion News Service. “I think this was enough time to comply. We need to look at this from a positive side.”

It’s been much tougher for independent churches and congregations founded by a single person, many of which are smaller Pentecostal churches in rural areas.

Traditionally, Pentecostals and independent charismatic churches have said the Holy Spirit and the Bible equip them fully for ministry and that formal training is unnecessary, according to Reuben van Rensburg, a project manager with Re-Forma, a South African-based ministry that educates and trains church leaders.

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These pastors “would have to have the right entry requirements if they were going to study at a tertiary institution,” he said. “They would have to pay for it, which most of them can’t, and they would have to leave their ministry or their family for an extended period of time, which they’re not willing to do.”

The legal crackdown has also spurred efforts to make theological education more accessible. The RGB announced a collaboration with Re-Forma last year, agreeing to accept the ministry’s certification as evidence that a pastor has obtained suitable theological training.

After a meeting in June, 31 denominations in Rwanda committed to participating in Re-Forma’s training programs, and RGB officials agreed to honor Re-Forma certification. With the change in RGB leadership, however, Re-Forma is uncertain whether this agreement will be upheld.

Many churches that meet the theological requirements have found it challenging to fulfill all the building-related requirements, which include regulations about the distance of toilets from the church entrance, paved access roads, and painted and plastered inside walls and ceilings. When the pandemic hit and the government closed all churches, it required them to install handwashing stations before reopening.

One Kigali church was closed at the end of July because it lacked a fire extinguisher, two garbage bins, and a lightning protector. The pastor, who noted that his congregation was previously closed for four months in 2018 because it was not soundproof, said they have since addressed the government’s most recent concerns. However, they are currently meeting only on Zoom and don’t have a sense of when the government will allow them to reopen.

Other churches were closed because they were not built on the minimum area of land required or lacked a proper waste management system, security cameras, or painted walls, said one denominational leader who asked not to be named for security reasons.

Fulfilling these requirements can seem arbitrary and spurious to some. In addition to the parking requirements, the government also requires greenery.

“Remember, we are in the dry season,” the denomination leader said. “Even if you plant the greening, it will not grow the same day.”

The government wants churches with air conditioning, high-quality sound systems, and accommodations for people with disabilities, seemingly on a par with the US and Canada, he said. Maybe that’s possible for Anglican, Presbyterian, and Catholic churches, which have operated in the country for more than a century and have their own revenue-generating projects, or for those with connections to outside funders like World Vision, which has implemented handwashing stations at some churches.

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But for churches fully dependent on tithes, “You can’t expect it to be done in Africa in a short period,” he said.

The leader’s denomination is currently asking the churches that have not been closed to contribute to a fund to help reopen the closed places of worship. It is reaching out to contacts who can help them make their case to the government.

“We need serious prayers. It’s a movement that intends to limit the freedom of worship. And you know the consequences—if people don’t go to church, they will do other things,” he said.

Though many find the government oversight overwhelming, some Christians still see it as important.

Harvesters Church in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, was shut down on August 4 because the government was missing verification that its pastor had finished his bachelor’s degree in theology and leadership.

The pastor, Fred Kayitare, is optimistic that his congregation of around 500 will soon reopen and said he “totally agreed” with the theology training requirements. He described them as “for the goodness of the congregation.”

“I am the living example. I planted a church before I attended theological college. I can witness the change and transformation I acquired from school,” he said. “I’m another person now. And everyone at our church who knew me before can witness that. I even sent four other ministers from our church to the Bible college. We’re now five theology graduates from the same church.”

The post Rwanda Explains Why It Closed Thousands of Churches. Again. appeared first on Christianity Today.

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“If you don’t stand for pro-life principles, you don’t get pro-life votes.”

That’s what Lila Rose, a leading pro-life activist, posted Monday on social media, in response to the latest move from Donald Trump’s campaign to moderate its stance on abortion.

It’s the line that put her at the center of controversy this week, with Trump supporters blaming her for jeopardizing the GOP ticket and calling her a grifter. The clash spurred further debate over what committed pro-lifers should do as they become increasingly sidelined by the Republican Party.

The online infighting comes at a moment when the pro-life movement is recalibrating after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade and as national Republican leaders have backed away from making abortion central to the GOP’s 2024 campaign message.

“We represent a constituency that has no voice, who can’t speak for themselves, and so it’s our job to speak for them,” Rose, founder of the pro-life nonprofit Live Action, told Christianity Today. “We’re being told, You have to shut up and sit down, and you should just be grateful for whatever we give you. And if we play politics that way, the pro-life movement will become completely defunct.”

Rose, a former evangelical who converted to Catholicism, stands by her convictions without compromise: She doesn’t support exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the mother, and wants a federal abortion ban.

Republicans went back and forth on X over Rose’s implication that pro-lifers should withhold votes from Trump. The self-proclaimed “most pro-life president in history” appointed the justices who overturned Roe two years ago. But more recently, he’s leaned toward leaving abortion up to the states and even mentioned backing women’s “reproductive rights,” often used to reference abortion.

The stakes are high for voters who reject Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and her campaign’s emphasis on protecting the right to abortion. Liz Wheeler, a conservative political commentator, wrote that “refusing to vote for Trump is a vote for Kamala Harris, the most gruesome pro-abortion politician in our country.”

Conservative commentator Ashley St. Clair was among Rose’s most vocal critics, telling nearly one million followers on X that it was “evil” for Rose to try to suppress pro-life voters “in the most consequential election in US history.”

St. Clair, operations manager at The Babylon Bee and the author of a Christian children’s book on gender identity, has described herself as “rather libertarian on the abortion issue.”

She accused Rose of using millions of dollars from pro-lifers wastefully, such as hosting an event at a Ritz Carlton, while others said Live Action should spend more on donations to pregnancy resource centers or ads in states with abortion ballot initiatives.

Rose founded Live Action as a teenager, gaining national prominence 15 years ago through undercover videos at Planned Parenthood. The nonprofit has grown what it says is the largest social following among pro-life organizations. In an interview Wednesday with CT, Rose shrugged off the criticism.

“My job is to advocate for people who are in danger of being murdered, and they are little babies,” she said. “People angry with me on Twitter is a small price to pay for advocating for the interest of children in danger of abortion, who currently, foolishly, are being thrown under the bus by not just the RNC platform but by the latest statements from the Trump campaign.”

Several major pro-life voices came to Rose’s defense, saying the accusations were a “misrepresentation” of Live Action’s mission and clarifying that most of the expenses on Live Action’s 990 form went toward employee salaries and producing video content.

2 things are true: 1) @LilaGraceRose's work to change hearts & minds and expose the lies of the abortion industry is unrivaled 2) Harris & Walz are abortion fanatics & must be defeated. If they win they will abolish the filibuster & force abortion without limit on all 50 states

— Marjorie Dannenfelser (@marjoriesba) 2 things are true: 1) @LilaGraceRose's work to change hearts & minds and expose the lies of the abortion industry is unrivaled 2) Harris & Walz are abortion fanatics & must be defeated. If they win they will abolish the filibuster & force abortion without limit on all 50 states

— Marjorie Dannenfelser (@marjoriesba) August 27, 2024

?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>August 27, 2024They also respected Rose’s position.

Trump supporters “want to destroy her because she’s not bending at the knee,” wrote Bethany Mandel, a conservative Jewish author. “Lila is verbalizing something I’m hearing a lot from pro-life voters: Their votes should not be taken for granted.”

John Shelton, policy director for former vice president Mike Pence’s foundation, Advancing American Freedom, said he believes the attacks on Rose are misguided. For voters who have abortion as their main motivating issue, Shelton said it’s reasonable that they would want to lobby for (or against) their preferred policies.

“She’s a winnable voter,” Shelton said of Rose. “All Trump would probably need to say is, Yeah, I take that back. Somebody told me to do that. … But I’m going to be the pro-life candidate. I’m going to find something that we can pass, and we’ll reduce abortions. And this conversation wouldn’t be happening.”

My personal message to the Trump campaign on abortion: pic.twitter.com/TrjQI2BQqE

— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) My personal message to the Trump campaign on abortion: pic.twitter.com/TrjQI2BQqE

— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) August 28, 2024

?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>August 28, 2024While there have always been factions that have disagreed on political strategy, the recent fight highlights fractures in the pro-life movement that have been more on display since the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.

Over the course of the presidential campaign, Trump has taken care to distance himself from stances like the ones Rose holds and to move to the political center on abortion. The evolution has come as some on the political right have viewed the Dobbs decision as an electoral liability that has cost Republicans at the ballot box.

On Friday, Trump posted on Truth Social that his administration “will be great for women and their reproductive rights,” a phrase typically used to describe access to abortion. Also over the weekend, his vice presidential pick, Vance, said that Trump would veto abortion ban legislation.

Trump has also overseen an overhaul of the Republican Party platform on the issue of abortion. In July, the platform watered down its long-held stance seeking nationwide limits on abortion and moved to a position that opposes late term abortion, suggesting the issue is best left to the states.

While a small minority of conservative evangelicals have put their support behind Harris, Rose and others who are pushing for a more rigorous stance from the GOP don’t see Democrats as a viable alternative.

“I don’t want Kamala Harris in office,” Rose told CT. “And I also don’t want the Republican Party to increasingly become pro-abortion.” Rose has devoted episodes of her podcast to talking about the Democrats’ embrace of abortion as part of the 2024 campaign. The Democratic party platform includes a section affirming that they believe “every woman should be able to access … safe and legal abortion” and states the party opposes restrictions on the procedure, including on abortion pills.

White evangelicals are the only religious group with a majority opposed to abortion, with 73 percent saying it should be illegal in all or most cases. Public support on the issue has moved up and down, but currently 63 percent of Americans say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, Pew Research Center found.

relatedRepublican Party Backs Away from Pro-Life Stance in New PlatformHarvest Prude

Since Dobbs, Trump has articulated a more hands-off approach to abortion, holding that abortion policy should be left to the discretion of voters in each state. He’s also suggested he wouldn’t seek to restrict abortion medication.

Last September, Trump criticized Gov. Ron DeSantis for signing a Florida bill to prohibit abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, saying it was a “terrible thing and a terrible mistake.” At the time, he added that he wouldn’t sign federal legislation banning abortion at 15 weeks.

In previous races, Trump had to work against concerns that he would be too squishy on life: In 2016, he named conservative Supreme Court nominees and picked Mike Pence for vice president, who sponsored at least seven measures to defund Planned Parenthood in his time in Congress and signed every pro-life bill that reached the governor’s mansion during his tenure in Indiana.

At the time, that was key to Trump’s courting the evangelical vote. But in 2024, it’s unclear whether the majority of evangelicals will require Trump to articulate a pro-life position to earn their support. Instead, single-issue pro-life voters who question supporting Trump seem to be the ones on the defensive.

“Increasingly, his platform and his rhetoric is pro-abortion, and that should disturb and concern the pro-life movement,” Rose told Fox News.

Rose addressed the controversy on her podcast Tuesday. The episode title was “Trump Might Lose If He Keeps This Up.” She played a clip of Trump speaking at the 2020 March for Life, in which he pledged support for legislation that would prohibit abortion.

“Look at the departure. I mean, that was a great Trump right there. I remember the electricity in the pro-life movement,” she commented.

Given Trump’s current positions, Rose said she won’t vote for Trump. But she hopes he reverses course, telling CT she would be “happy to talk with Trump” or his team. Katelyn Walls Shelton, a fellow with the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, said she isn’t seeing defections toward the Democrat side but rather hearing pro-lifers question whether they will “vote at all.”

“I definitely hope that [Trump’s team] is listening. Because I think that if Trump changes course on this, he could be very inspiring,” Rose said.

After the episode aired, she tagged the Republican Party and Donald Trump in a post, essentially pleading with him to return to his previous positions on abortion. The message was clear: The ball is now in their court.“People say, Well, you’re suppressing the vote if you call out Trump for this. I’m not suppressing the vote if Trump does this—Trump’s suppressing his own vote,” Rose told CT. “The responsibility is on Trump to get people to vote for him and to win the pro-life vote.”

The post Activist Lila Rose Under Fire for Suggesting Trump Hasn’t Earned the Pro-Life Vote appeared first on Christianity Today.

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On June 25, 2024, Eastern Nazarene College announced that it will close at the end of the year. I specify the date because it matters: The news came well after faculty members had begun planning syllabi and courses for the fall semester. To say this was a bombshell for them and their students is an understatement. Six months’ notice might be long in other contexts, but in academia, it’s scandalously brief.

This story is not unique among Christian colleges, and it raises an increasingly pressing question: What does it look like to navigate closures ethically and compassionately?

Christian institutions should be particularly committed to shutting down or downsizing in a way that treats faculty, staff, and students with love. Ending things well is an essential part of bearing witness and displaying good fruit for Christian colleges and universities, but, unfortunately, Eastern Nazarene’s behavior is far from exceptional.

Last summer, for example, conflicting announcements were coming out of The King’s College in New York City. The school laid off a number of faculty and ultimately canceled all fall classes, yet its board refused to take the final step to closure. It’s easy to imagine why they hesitated, but this proved to be a heartbreaking approach that raised warrantless hopes and left scholars scrambling to find new work.

The last few years have also seen closures by Christian institutions including programs at Trinity International University, Alliance University (formerly Nyack College), Goddard College, and Clarks Summit University. Even longer is the list of institutions, like Cornerstone University, that haven’t closed yet have ruthlessly cut programs, often in the humanities, in a desperate attempt to reinvent themselves and remain afloat. Some of the institutions on both lists have been struggling for years, and, in many cases, the pandemic accelerated their troubles.

This is all depressing, especially if you are a professor or a student or one of the alumni of the affected institutions—oran ex-professor like me. CT’s Emily Belz recently highlighted the challenge involved in records keeping for alumni of shuttered institutions. But what we’re seeing now is only the beginning; we should expect much more of these closures over the decade to come.

The single biggest reason for this is not unique to Christian schools. It’s the long-predicted “demographic cliff.” US birthrates dropped to an all-time low during the Great Recession and never bounced back. Next year, in 2025, we’ll be 18 years past that initial plunge, and our national birthrate remains below replacement level.

All things being equal, this means that every year for the foreseeable future, the entering freshman class in colleges nationwide will decline. Harvard will probably be just fine. Tiny Christian colleges without a national reputation, not so much. Even Wheaton College, the “evangelical Harvard,” had to make adjustments for this reality in late 2022.

relatedChristian Colleges Try Eliminating Tuition to Draw StudentsEmily Belz

Going forward, nearly all Christian colleges will have to plan to shrink, merge, or close. These difficult choices will be unavoidable and necessary. But, to get back to the question I posed at the outset, how college leadership approaches these decisions matters, and how Christian college leadership does it should be recognizably shaped by Christian ethics.

The biggest part of that how is when. The boards and other leadership of schools headed for cuts and closure must give faculty and staff the earliest possible notice that job loss is a possibility. For faculty, I’d argue that one year’s advance notice is the minimum that compassion requires.

True, in many other workplaces, a two-week notice is customary and sufficient. But higher education works differently because of its quirky annual hiring cycle. With very few exceptions, academic jobs are posted in the fall and early spring. Hires are concluded by late spring, and new positions begin in August. That means faculty need at least a full school year to have any chance of continuing to work in their field—not to mention to place a house on the market or finish out a lease and make plans for required relocation without losing a lot of money in the process.

There’s an obvious counterargument that can be made to such early advance notice of potential closure: It will prompt faculty to leave early, and such a loss of talent in short order could only make things worse for the institution’s reputation and fate. Maybe keeping quiet would buy leadership time to work behind the scenes to resolve the crisis.

relatedCan Christian Colleges Make the Grade?Interview by Nathan Finn

But this counterargument ignores how university budgets work. Colleges typically set their budgets at least two years in advance, which means leadership likely knows closure is coming a year or more ahead of time. At that point, a miracle in the form of a massive influx of major donations is possible, perhaps, but it’s unlikely. Keeping quiet almost certainly can’t save the school—and certainly can’t justify playing with people’s lives (or, at least, their livelihoods).

Faculty layoffs at Cornerstone University, also this past June, were reportedly even worse by this measure of timeliness and transparency: “Several former Cornerstone faculty told [Religion News Service] that all six of those who left were tenured and had already signed contracts for the forthcoming school year when they were informed in June that their roles were being ended—likely too late to be able to obtain a similar spot elsewhere.” Even one year out of academia can be career-ending in our dismal higher-ed job market, so those lost jobs may well be these faculty members’ last university roles.

This timing is also devastating for students. Sure, some will transfer to other colleges—there are plenty out there, in this climate, that are eager to welcome more students, and closing schools, including Eastern Nazarene, have arranged transfer agreements with comparable institutions. But in practice, just over half of students who go through college closures never re-enroll. They’re probably demoralized and in debt and definitely left without a degree.

relatedThe Evangelical Diploma DivideDaniel K. Williams

College and program closures affect real people, disrupting their lives and plans, and the shorter the notice, the more extreme the disruption. Christian university boards and administrators owe their employees and students more honesty and love.

In theory, of course, financial information about all private Christian schools is public per IRS rules. Institutional leadership might want to claim this absolves them from the charge of covering up dire financial straits. But the repeated shock that faculty and students express whenever they learn that their beloved institution is closing shows that they are not in the habit of looking up those forms on their own. Of course, why should they? That is not their duty.

If institutions that need to re-evaluate their finances in the future need a model, Wheaton has showed what it looks like to communicate genuine compassion for faculty, staff, and students. Two years ago, the college announced “a reduction of approximately 10 percent of the academic division, which includes faculty and academic staff, over the next three years to avoid a projected financial deficit.”

The striking part was the timing: “Ten faculty members, about 5 percent of the college’s 213 tenured, tenure-track faculty and permanent lecturers, were notified that their positions would end in June 2024 or June 2025.” The announcement was made on November 17, 2022, giving affected faculty notice of at least a year and a half.

relatedWhen One Christian College Closes, Another Takes Care of Its Alumni NeedsEmily Belz

That good practice needn’t be unusual. Considering how far ahead universities make budget projections, this kind of timeline is realistic for other institutions facing serious financial constraints. Furthermore, Wheaton’s case shows that such transparency need not result in a damaging loss of talent.

As we say about parenting, so much of faith and ethics are “caught, not taught.” Christian witness in difficult situations matters immensely, and in an age when we so often hear of cruel and unethical leadership, Christian college leaders could stand apart. Compassion may not keep college doors open, but it will make a difference in the lives of God’s image-bearers.

Nadya Williams is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church (Zondervan Academic, 2023) and the forthcoming Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (IVP Academic, 2024).

The post More Christian Colleges Will Close. Can They Finish Well? appeared first on Christianity Today.

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The first episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, season 2, are out August 29 on Amazon Prime. Christianity Today asked three writers to screen the season in advance and identify a theme for fans to keep in mind as they watch.

Evil in disguise“Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light,” warns the apostle Paul (2 Cor. 11:14). So too in J. R. R. Tolkien’s mythology does the dark lord Sauron sometimes appear in “fair form.” In the guise of nobility, beauty, and goodness, he deceives and manipulates what he cannot win by conquest.

We never saw Sauron’s “fair form” in Peter Jackson’s justly beloved Lord of the Rings film trilogy. And in season 1 of Amazon’s prequel series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (ROP), we saw a Sauron who was more conflicted and confused than lovely. That season’s gimmicky reveal—the hapless cockney Southlander Halbrand was, gasp, Sauron all along!—was a cheap payoff for eight hours of otherwise impressive world-building and plotting.

Season 2 of Rings of Power is far stronger than season 1. It ramps everything up—including the action, violence, and gore (parental caution advised), as Amazon goes after the Game of Thrones audience. Happily, the show has fixed some of its pacing issues; though it occasionally struggles to juggle five locations and subplots, it also successfully stitches together the mass of jumbled, at times inconsistent narrative threads that Tolkien left behind. If nothing else, ROP is a sumptuous show, with lavish sets, costumes, and effects.

But the strongest compliment I can pay to Rings of Power season 2 is that its portrayal of Sauron, excellently done by Charlie Vickers, is unnervingly persuasive—fully embracing and making use of Sauron as a deceitful angel of light. Sauron, disguised as an emissary of the gods, worms his way into the confidence of elven master smith Celebrimbor and dwarven king Durin III with a light touch. He suggests and questions, and rarely demands; he plants ideas and lets them germinate; he flatters and compliments; he relentlessly appeals to pride, vanity, and ambition.

At one point, Sauron pushes too hard, and Celebrimbor calls him out on his tricks. The ROP writers don’t condescend to their characters; they don’t rely on the cheap trick of making the characters too dumb to figure out what’s going on until it’s time for the climax.

Instead, Celebrimbor both gradually succumbs to Sauron and is increasingly self-aware of what is happening, yet is still unable to stop it. This is the most affecting plot thread of the season, given real weight with Charles Edwards’ Celebrimbor. Tragically, it seems to resonate with the spiritual truths Tolkien likely had in mind—not only of Satan’s proclivity for disguise but for the powerlessness of our flesh to resist him without divine aid.

Paul D. Miller is a professor of the practice of international affairs at Georgetown University and a research fellow with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

Present presenceOur normal relationship to time is full of unknowns. Despite our best efforts, we cannot predict the future.

But as a prequel, Rings of Power temporarily transforms us into seers, offering us the “before” of the story so we might better identify the “after.” For a few tantalizing hours, the viewer is omniscient. Even as we see something “new”—backstories we didn’t know before—we’re reveling in affectionate nostalgia for something old: The familiar books and films that ROP both precedes (in narrative time) and follows (in “real-world” time). Janus-faced, we look to both the future and the past.

J. R. R. Tolkien, meanwhile, seemed to endorse a different view of time than what’s offered by our frantic 21st-century schedules and hour-long episodes of television: a particular emphasis on the present, on what’s now rather than what’s next. The most important moments in the Lord of the Rings unfold gradually along arduous journeys, during joyous feasts, and in quiet conversations between friends. Tolkien’s wisest characters—Elrond, Tom Bombadil, and Gandalf—fully inhabit the present; they realize that struggle is essential, that renewal cannot be rushed.

“Time is the process of creation, and things of space are results of creation,” wrote rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Tolkien’s books are about that process—the slow work of character development and world-building and good triumphing over evil.

But in this second season of The Rings of Power, even the sagest elves (Galadriel and Elrond, for instance) are caught up in urgency and haste. The journey is rushed.

Perhaps this breathlessness can be instructive for the viewer. These days, most of us are challenged by “the present.” Like the prequel, we are always looking backward at what’s been and forward at what’s to come. How do we attend simply to what is?

Some moments of ROP allow for such contemplation: a defiant craftsman composed in the face of evil, the quiet love of a brave captain. Here, the frenzied storytelling finally finds its flow. In such moments, the viewer is reminded that presence is all we really ever have. Fearful foretelling is the realm of Saruman and Denethor. We, as Christians, are called to “be still, and know” that the Lord is God (Ps. 46:10). The present is the single moment in which we can both delight in the light and defy the darkness—in and through and by the grace of God.

Gracy Olmstead is a journalist whose writing has appeared in The American Conservative, The Week, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and is the author of Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind.

Genuine friendshipUnlikely friendships abound in season 2 of Rings of Power.

Nori the Harfoot (Markella Kavenagh) and The Stranger (Daniel Weyman) journey together to the desert region of Middle-earth’s Rhûn, hoping to find answers about The Stranger’s identity.

Sauron establishes a bond with Celebrimbor, telling the elven smith, “There is no place for half-truths between those who have worked so close as you and I.”

But as Sauron’s dark power spreads, relationships fracture. Hearts grow corruptible. Convictions turn shaky.

In short: Friendship in ROP is wielded as a weapon. Words are used to cajole and manipulate; actions only serve to further selfish interests.

In modern-day parlance, we would call such friendships “toxic”—one person tries to exert control over another, exulting in their influence. Sauron engages in deceit and sows seeds of doubt to make Celebrimbor, and everyone else in Eregion, bend to his will.

Yet, however powerful Sauron appears to be, he’s also pitiful, someone who will never be able to enjoy the freedom that comes in relationship. Grasping for power and dominion over Middle-earth, he is the biggest loser when it comes to making friends.

Friendship, after all, is a gift. It is to be held lightly, woven in faith and trust that one is here for the other’s good, and vice versa. It does not fashion another in our own likeness, to yield to our wants and needs wherever and whenever we demand.

Nori and The Stranger’s friendship exemplifies this beautifully and serves as a foil to Sauron and Celebrimbor. When The Stranger gets separated from Nori, he encounters the enigmatic Tom Bombadil, who tells him that he has to choose between finding his friend and seeking his destiny.

It’s an impossible choice, perhaps, but The Stranger decides that friendship is worth more than self-discovery.

“We’re very different creatures, Nori, when all is said and done,” says The Stranger after he rescues Nori.

“Not so different at all, if you ask me,” Nori replies.

Scripture tells us that genuine Christian friendships are founded on mutuality. As the apostle Paul writes to his friends in Rome: “I long to see you so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to make you strong—that is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith” (Rom. 1:11–12).

Nori and The Stranger seek each other’s flourishing. And their unlikely friendship also involves some measure of risk, forged out of a willingness to learn about another’s culture and way of life. It is not transactional or quid pro quo.

Rings of Power’s latest season challenges us to redraw the bounds of our circles, to build relationships with people who might look or sound quite different from us. As we cultivate friendships with gentle wisdom and fierce tenacity, we make room for the surprising and edifying work of the Spirit.

Isabel Ong is associate Asia editor for Christianity Today.

The post What to Watch for in ‘Rings of Power’ Season 2 appeared first on Christianity Today.

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Next week’s Labor Day holiday honors the contributions workers make to society and celebrates the power and goodness of human work. But the historical roots of the holiday—which is grounded in advocacy against horrific working conditions, including those faced by child laborers—reminds us that work can also be awful.

Recent research bears witness to both sides of this reality. Studies demonstrate how employment makes a significant contribution to well-being in ways that go beyond our paychecks. “The pain caused by the experience of unemployment is one of the best-documented findings in all happiness research,” yet one recent study argues that pain essentially disappears when a person finds a new job. Clearly, work is good for you!

Except when it isn’t. Job quality also has a very significant effect on a person’s sense of well-being. Bad work can make life miserable and contribute to poor physical and mental health, as several studies suggest workers who “have little opportunity to use their skills” or influence decisions have significantly higher risks of back pain and heart disease.

And just like those early promoters of Labor Day recognized, workers are often exploited or excluded. Job applications with “Black” names still get far fewer callbacks from potential employers than do the exact same applications with “white” names. American companies steal billions of dollars from workers annually through “wage theft.” Low-wage workers saw the purchasing power of their wages decline from 1979 to 2013, even as the market grew 706 percent and average CEO pay grew by over 1,000 percent.

relatedGod of the Second ShiftJeff Haanen

Despite the massive impact work has on our lives, American Christians haven’t always been good at prioritizing work in our discipleship. Amy Sherman cites research that shows less than 10 percent of regular churchgoers remember their pastor preaching on work. The “faith and work” movement has done enormous good in trying to get the workplace back on the church’s discipleship agenda, while Christians passionate about justice have emphasized the need to confront economic injustice.

Nevertheless, we still often struggle to hold together both the powerful possibilities and deeply dysfunctional realities of work in our world. So, this Labor Day, perhaps it can help to revisit the Book of Exodus—which offers three glimpses of the promises and perils of work.

First, Exodus forces us to wrestle with the ugly reality of work that exploits. It all begins when Pharaoh becomes disturbed at how many Israelites he’s seeing around town. His response to this perceived problem offers us a masterclass in xenophobia and economic oppression. Pharaoh’s first step is to stir up fear of the Israelites’ otherness, essentially saying, “Since they’re not like us, they’re not really on our side!”:

[Pharaoh] said to his people, “The Israelite people are now larger in number and stronger than we are. Come on, let’s be smart and deal with them. Otherwise, they will only grow in number. And if war breaks out, they will join our enemies, fight against us, and then escape from the land.” (1:9–10, CEB)

By sowing seeds of anti-immigrant fear, Pharaoh paves the way for a particularly appealing solution. The Egyptians will simultaneously subdue and profit off the Israelites, forcing them to do hard labor and build “storage cities” for Pharaoh. Such backbreaking work expands Egypt’s ability to acquire more and more.

This exploitation provides the background for the most famous scenes in Exodus, when the Lord hears the groans of his oppressed people in their toil and comes down to confront Pharaoh. God demands that the Israelites be released from “working” for their Egyptian overlord so they can come and “work” for God (the Hebrew word translated as worship in passages like Ex. 4:23 is the Hebrew word for “work” or “service”).

And when Pharaoh refuses, God liberates his oppressed employees, dismantling Pharoah’s military and economic power in the process.

There’s no doubt Pharaoh managed to get a lot done during his time as an Israelite employer. But God hates unjust gain. In Exodus, the creator of the universe looks past the grandeur of Pharaoh’s Egypt to see a people nearly broken. The King of Kings hears the cries of oppressed workers, even over the endless noise of Pharaoh’s propaganda machine. The Lord, the maker of heaven and earth, takes his stand against Egypt’s ruler and his oppressive workplace.

God then takes those liberated people into the wilderness and offers them a beautiful vision for life as coworkers with him. In fact, God gives Israel’s leader, Moses, a blueprint for a major initiative that will require the whole community to pitch in. Shockingly, just as Moses is receiving instructions for this new effort, the Israelites decide to take on a project of their own.

Their disastrous decision offers us Exodus’s second window into the workplace: Sometimes, our work can be idolatrous.

While Moses is on the mountain with God, the people create the famous golden calf, an idol designed to represent the divine power that brought Israel up out of Egypt (32:4). Like allidols, the golden calf claimed some of the love, trust, and service the Israelites owed the Lord. Walter Moberly famously argued that this betrayal is the equivalent of cheating on your spouse on the first night of your honeymoon. But it’s also a workplace revolt; having been liberated from their oppressive Egyptian employers, the Israelites set up an idolatrous workshop of their own.

Creating the golden calf requires a great deal of sacrifice and collaboration. All the people “invest” in Golden Calf Enterprises by giving Aaron gold earrings as raw materials. While Exodus describes Aaron as “making” the golden calf, it seems reasonable that others pitched in as well. Their creativity and collaboration presumably created something beautiful, at least in the eyes of the craftspeople who built it together.

When the Lord smashed Egypt’s exploitative workplaces, the Israelites rejoiced. But in the wilderness, they discover this God will also destroy the idols they were so proud to create and so prone to worship. When he does so, those who clingto such shiny idols risk destruction as well (32:35).

But there’s a third act in Exodus’s workplace drama. In an act of outrageous grace, God forgives the people andrehires them for a special job: the building of the tabernacle. This beautiful tent serves as the Lord’s mobile home, allowing God to go on pilgrimage with his people (25:8).

The tabernacle is both God’s royal throne room and a Garden of Eden–inspired glimpse of creation as the Creator intended the world to be. Israel’s work on the tabernacle, then, facilitates God’s royal presence in their midst and offers the community a glimpse of God’s new creation.This tabernacle project is kingdom-oriented work. It creates a tangible glimpse of God’s generous presence, reign, and way in a broken world. Now, that’swork worth doing!

But they can’t do this work on their own. God gives Moses guidance for how to build the tabernacle (25:9). He also gives Spirit-inspired wisdom and skill to craftspeople like Bezalel and Oholiab so they can work creatively and collaboratively with the entire community (31:1–6). Together, they build this beautiful yet simple glimpse of heaven on earth (36:2–7). And then, in response to their Spirit-enabled work, the Lord takes up residence in the home his people have made for him.

These three types of work—exploitative, idolatrous, and kingdom-oriented—can help us think about workplace discipleship today.

Exodus reminds us that the workplace is often a place where people are exploited, not least when they manifest the kind of overwhelming imbalances of power or ethnic discrimination that we see in Exodus 1. Just as the Lord criticized and confronted exploitative labor back then, God’s people must do the same today. Disciples who serve the God of the Exodus must learn to sniff out and confront such injustice wherever it exists—whether in their own workplaces or through public advocacy and political action on behalf of workers more broadly.

recommendedWork Matters to God Because We MatterDavid L. Bahnsen

But if we want to avoid exploitative work, we’re also going to have to ask some hard questions. We’ll need to listen carefully to those for whom work does not work—including marginalized migrant workers, the working poor, and those suffering from sexual harassment or racial discrimination. We may need to consider the power imbalances reflected in the compensation structures and organizational processes of our own workplaces.

And we would do well to learn about Christians who prophetically pursued economic justice in the workplace in the past. Such leaders include Father José María Arizmendiarrieta, who helped found Mondragon, one of the world’s largest and oldest worker-owner cooperatives, currently employing 60,000 people worldwide; Cesar Chavez, whose faith-based, nonviolent labor organizing sought increased wages and better working conditions for exploited California farmworkers; and Martin Luther King Jr., who was assassinated during his participation in the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ strike demanding fair wages and safe labor conditions.

Of course, the Book of Exodus reminds us that even if our work isn’t overtly exploitative, it may well be idolatrous. The idols we make out of our work promise to deliver us, but they cannot make good on their commitments. Discipleship must train us to identify the idol-making propensity of our work, not least by reminding us that God hates our idols.

Our liturgical practices need to force us to reflect on the myriad subtle ways our work and ourworkplace might regularly create little idols for our idol-factory hearts to cling to—especially when such idol production often goes hand in hand with practices that exploit, oppress, and marginalize others for unjust gain.

Finally, Exodus invites us to embrace kingdom-oriented work. When we work in alignment with God’s purposes, collaborate with others on projects that create glimpses of the world as God designed it to be, and draw upon Spirit-given skills that allow us to make the sorts of beautiful places, services, and, dare I say it, products that echo God’s purposes for creation, our work becomes an act of worship.

As Mark Glanville puts it in his recent book, “By loving what Christ loves and challenging what Christ challenges” in our “parents’ groups, cafés, trucks, homes, factories, hospitals, and advocacy groups,” we bear witness “to the restoring reign of Christ.” We make the on-earth-as-it-is-in-heaven reign of God that is on the way glimpsable to ourselves and to our neighbors.

Churches can and should embrace the kind of discipleship that prepares us to confront exploitative work, reject idolatrous work, and embrace kingdom-oriented work. Preaching on Exodus with an awareness of the book’s economic vision could be a good start!

Matthew Kaemingk and Cory B. Willson also argue that the way church services are structured can help workers bring their work-related praises, confessions, laments, requests, petitions, and gifts into corporate worship. They offer free liturgies, songs, and prayers to help you do just that at Worship for Workers. One of my favorites involves inviting congregants to decorate the Lord’s Supper table with visible signs of their own vocations.

Amy Sherman’s Kingdom Calling offers a vast array of stories and practices to help Christians discover how to exercise their “vocational power” justly and righteously through work. And Robby Holt, Brian Fikkert, and I wrote Practicing the King’s Economy in part to provide churches with discipleship tools and resources to help us bend our workplaces toward God’s kingdom. We include guidance for how Christians can create opportunities for those who most struggle to find jobs and flourish in them.

At an even simpler level, research shows that “supportive coworkers” and quality supervisors play an enormousrole in the well-being of workers. How many Christians might discover an opportunity for kingdom work simply by giving more attention to the way they love their workplace neighbor?

Exodus doesn’t offer easy or straightforward answers to all our workplace questions. Yet it does invite us into a lifelong journey of discipleship in our work lives. There are some easy wins for churches that want to get started, but fully embracing Exodus’s invitations and challenges will require a lifetime of costly, time-consuming formation. But since most Christians spend most of their waking lives at work, what area of our discipleship could possibly be more pressing?

The present moment is ripe with opportunities for us to reckon with the powerful possibilities and painful realities of work. What better time to make a start than this Labor Day?

Michael J. Rhodes is an Old Testament lecturer at Carey Baptist College, the author of Just Discipleship: Biblical Justice in an Unjust World, and coauthor of Practicing the King’s Economy.

The post Choose This (Labor) Day Whom You Will Serve appeared first on Christianity Today.

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

Not long ago, a woman told me about a conflict she was having with a fellow member of her church. Conflict might be the wrong word, since it seemed mostly one-sided. The woman said that the other church member was telling falsehoods about her in hallway conversations and social media groups.

“You seem to mostly ignore it when people lie about you,” the woman said to me. “Is that because it would be wrong for me to defend myself? Should I just ignore what they say about me?”

Part of the problem with answering this question is that we often think wrongly about what it means to “ignore.” Ignoring something sounds, by definition, passive—it is, literally, not to know and thus not to respond. And yet, ignorance—rightly defined—is active. In order to ignore well, we have to know well. That’s perhaps the biggest obstacle to making the decision to ignore or to engage.

Responding to slander about oneself is biblically complicated in a way that some other questions—say, “Should I have an affair?” or “Should I embezzle from my company?” —are not. “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself,” the Bible says in one verse (Prov. 26:4, ESV throughout). And then the very next verse says, “Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.” This isn’t a contradiction. There are times when responding is the right thing to do, and times when it’s the wrong thing.

Morality is not the compilation of data but conformity to a Person. The example of Jesus is complicated too because, as the wisdom of God, Jesus could see perfectly what we see imperfectly—which situations call for a Proverbs 26:4 ignoring and which call for a Proverbs 26:5 engaging.

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When it comes to slander about himself, Jesus sometimes directly contradicted untruth (John 5:19–46). Sometimes, he responded not with a defense of himself but by asking questions or telling stories that revealed the underlying motives (Luke 14:1–6). Quite often, he simply ignored what was said about him altogether (Mark 11:33). At least once, he even ridiculed the slander (Luke 7:28–34).

In all those contexts, though, Jesus modeled what it means to avoid the warning of Proverbs, that is, to avoid sinning in response to sins against us. He said: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well” (Matt. 5:38–40).

The apostle Peter commands us to be less concerned about what people say about us than about what we actually are. “If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you,” he wrote. “But let none of you suffer as a murder or a thief or an evildoer or as a meddler” (1 Pet. 4:14–15).

That requires a knowing of your own vulnerabilities. My church-slandered conversation partner noted that I usually ignore untrue things said about me, but she probably overestimated how much I even know about them. I don’t search my name or look at tagged replies from people I don’t follow on social media. That’s not because I think people are wrong to do that but because I know myself; if I paid attention to that stuff, I would be distracted. I couldn’t do what God has called me to do.

The woman I was talking to might be different. But if you have a tendency for quarrelsomeness or an oversensitivity to other people’s approval, you might be best served not just by ignoring slander but by trying to avoid, so much as is possible with you, knowing about it altogether. If you can’t respond to slander without retaliation or revenge, don’t do it.

This also requires knowing the situation. Jesus treated people who were genuinely confused by misinformation (John 1:45–51) differently from those who were seeking to, as Matthew put it, “entangle him in his words” (Matt. 22:15–22). Many of the people I know who exert time and energy “correcting the record” about themselves often don’t recognize the reasons behind why the lies are told about them.

Sometimes it’s genuine misinformation—in which case, confronting the lie with the truth might be the right thing to do. In many cases, though, the problem is not that the truth isn’t available but rather that it isn’t useful. In such cases, people are trying to build a “platform” for themselves by making inflammatory statements about someone other people in their world know. To respond to that makes as much sense as Jodie Foster responding to John Hinckley shooting a president to get her attention.

There are sometimes quite different principles involved in defending others from slander than in defending oneself. Joseph forgiving his brothers for their injustice (Gen. 50:19–21) is commendable. If he had waved away their mistreatment of others, though, that would have been unjust. Generally speaking, the principles of Proverbs 27:2—“Let another praise you, and not your own mouth; a stranger, and not your own lips”—often can be applied to the question of responding to lies about oneself.

When someone’s lying about you, lean in the direction of ignoring it, unless obviously not applicable. When it comes to lies about someone else, do the reverse. To silently pass by while someone tells what you know to be lies about your neighbor is to get on the wrong side of Jesus’ parable of the beaten man and the Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37). Jesus waved off a lot of slander about himself, but he didn’t stand for it when it was directed toward, for instance, the man he healed from blindness (John 9:1–5).

The first-century church at Smyrna suffered slander from all directions: Their home religious community disowned them. The Roman Empire labeled them as seditious and erosive of national character. Jesus told them he knew about the slander, that it would get worse, but that what it means to overcome is a matter of his judgment seat, not the judgment of everyone else (Rev. 2:8–11).

The woman who asked me how—or whether—to respond to lies about her needs to know, above all, that Jesus knows the difference between the truth and lies; he is the difference between truth and lies. When deciding whether to correct the record or to remain silent and entrust yourself to God, seek to know yourself and your situation—but, most of all, seek to know him.

Sometimes a response is right. But more often than you might think, ignorance is blessed.

Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.

The post When to Respond to Slander (and When to Ignore It) appeared first on Christianity Today.

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When the waiter brought out my long-awaited high tea that day, I didn’t expect I’d still be grieving it decades later.

I was 21 and enjoying my first “real” spring break during a debt-building week away in London. After years of devouring chaste romances set in England, I’d learned that Harrods was the best place to experience the glories of scones, clotted cream, and tiny sandwiches, all served on tiers of gleaming china and, of course, washed down with hot tea. So on my inaugural trip across the sea, it seemed only right to indulge my credit card’s largesse on a high tea at Harrods. Alone.

As I looked around the room that day, I knew I’d made a grave mistake. Not even the tender scones and decadent clotted cream could balance the bitter taste of regret. They worsened it. With each new delight, I felt more keenly the lack of someone to share my enjoyment with.

When I was doing fieldwork for my book on singleness, someone told me it might be worse to eat alone than sleep alone. Eating alone is certainly a problem for people who live by themselves. But with 21st-century work schedules, sports practices, and other structural realities, even those with seemingly “built-in” meal companions in spouses or children or roommates often dine solo too. When we do share supper, allergies and dietary restrictions can create other divides. This shift has even changed apartment and home designs as dining rooms fall out of fashion.

Sometimes, the solitude of a meal alone feels welcome. Perhaps an introvert drained by a day of meetings wants nothing more than time alone to decompress. And for some harried parents, a quiet cup of coffee—a reward for getting up before the rest of the household—might feel like a rare and precious solace.

But for Christians, the question of how and with whom we eat involves more than our own preferences. What is God’s design for our meals?

Scripture includes a surprising number of stories featuring food. To prepare for liberation from slavery, God has the Israelites eat a special Passover meal of lamb, unleavened bread, and bitter herbs that observant Jews continue to recreate annually to this day. Jesus later reinterpreted this meal in the bread and wine of the Eucharist.

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Jesus used food to make connections with outcasts and sinners. He made a meal to mend the rift caused by Peter’s betrayal, frying fish for breakfast on the beach. And it was only at the table that an Emmaus-bound duo finally recognized him.

Food also played a pivotal role in helping the early church grasp the extent of God’s vision for his people. As Willie James Jennings writes in his commentary on Acts, “to eat the animals that were associated with a people was to move into their space of living.”

This gives great significance to Peter’s thrice-repeated vision calling him to eat previously forbidden food. Jennings writes,

Peter is not being asked to possess as much as he is being asked to enter in, become through eating a part of something that he did not imagine himself a part of before the eating. This new eating grows out of another invitation to eat, one offered by his savior and friend: “This is my body, which is given for you.”

Not every church embodies a diversity that fully reflects the body of Christ. But to the extent we do, food provides one of the best ways to connect through our shared identity as God’s children. We all need the Eucharist’s embodied reminder of grace. Other shared meals, like post-service potlucks or coffee hours, point to both our equal dependence on God for life and the feast that awaits us in heaven.

And whether feeding the hungry and marginalized or organizing meals for the sick and weary, we acknowledge two truths: Our lives are interconnected, and what we do for the “least” in our midst touches Jesus himself. As the late Orthodox bishop David Mahaffey told me, “To me, God has given us food as a way of communion with him.”

What does all this mean for our many meals alone? Do they inherently fall short of God’s good design for sustenance?

One of my favorite things about the Bible is how much of life it contains: all kinds of people, all kinds of situations.

In the Book of 1 Kings, God sends Elijah east to Cherith, a presumably remote place where he’s instructed to hide until further notice. The author gives few details about this season, apart from the miracle of sustenance God provides against a backdrop of growing famine. Ravens, better known for taking food, bear the prophet’s meals.

Perhaps because of the birds, I’d never thought about the meals themselves as lonely. Yet Elijah must have spent day after day eating without human company. (For that matter, Adam, too would have eaten “alone” until God created Eve.)

I want to be careful not to fill in details the biblical authors did not provide. But a few things strike me about these men’s solitary meals. First, they involve an implied fellowship with God. Meals aside, the little we know of Adam and Elijah’s solitary seasons suggests a strong rapport with the Lord. Surely that extended to their meals too. In fact, perhaps they didn’t really feel alone because of his presence.

Second, both received direct provision from God—water and the ravens’ food for Elijah, fruit for Adam. Under these circumstances, I would hope both men regularly offered thanks. How often and well do we do this? Scarfing down a piece of toast while we drive or eating leftovers on the couch, it’s all too easy to dive in with scarcely a word of acknowledgment.

Lastly, it strikes me that both men ate alone during seasons of preparation. As Priscilla Shirer draws out in her study of Elijah, God used the time at Cherith to prepare Elijah for unexpected communion at Zarephath and eventual confrontation with Ahab. Adam’s meals alone occurred during a time of learning about the work God had given him and slowly coming to realize his need for human companionship. In fact, they occurred before the Fall!

So maybe our meals alone can still honor God’s design. How? Maybe we slow down to notice the sights, sounds, scents, sensations, and tastes of eating. (This can also help with anxiety and stress.) Instead of distracting ourselves with YouTube or social media, we can acknowledge and welcome God’s presence with us. And we can give sincere thanks for those who made and delivered and planted and cultivated and harvested, as well as the One who provided the rain.

And also: We should try to eat with others as often as possible.

I write this as someone who now eats many meals alone, sitting at my gate-leg dining table in the chair that faces the window. Thanks to one book interview with a Norwegian man who sometimes paid bills while he ate—and hated this—I try hard to avoid doing work during dinner. On better nights, I eat while reading or listening to a book. On worse nights, I scroll on my phone.

Not long ago, I shared a late-night bite with a friend who’d come by to get something. We almost always eat something together during visits, often my latest homemade soup. A few bites into that night’s bowl, he asked, “How was your day?”

After years of living in community, I’m now several months into only the second place I’ve rented alone in some 20 years. At my friend’s simple question, my shoulders dropped and tension melted away. Suddenly I was back at the family dinner table of my junior high and high school years.

On weekdays, we rarely ate any other meal with my dad. So he used our dinners to help all six of us connect. One by one, he went around to each of us as we shared “high” and “low” points from our day. This was one of the most emotionally formative rituals of my upbringing. It had a structured cleanup ritual (a nightly chore rotation, carefully tracked on the calendar), and clear boundaries for limited dissent from the family rules (we each got one dish from Mom’s recipe rotation that we didn’t have to eat).

Through our Friday night dinners of homemade hamburgers and French fries, we learned to celebrate the ordinary. Sometimes, our parents even splurged on a two-liter bottle of pop, though I wouldn’t make the connection to work weeks or paychecks until I became an adult myself.

Hospitality sacralizes the everyday. While apps help some find restaurant meal partners, eating at home has an extra vulnerability that deepens connections and accommodates more varied budgets. I love that another friend who lives nearby has started texting me when he’s made too many potatoes or too much chili (often leading to an impromptu meal). Other friends know they might have to clear a dining table chair or that I might serve leftovers. After months of such visits, one married friend finally invited me over for lunch at her home—our first meal there in a yearslong friendship.

Sharing food can take vulnerability and flexibility. But once you get past the initial risk or discomfort, deeper connection usually follows, and loneliness recedes.

Last summer, I briefly lived with a couple who often didn’t connect until the end of their day. Before he left for his bartending job, the husband prepped dinner in the Instant Pot and left it for his wife to eat when she came home from her work as a hairdresser. One night, he made chili; another night, fish chowder. Even when he got home late, even if she’d already eaten what he’d prepared, they often debriefed their days over additional shared food or drink.

When I moved in with the couple, they were eager to embrace communal living, but doubtful we could eat together. I cooked very differently from them, and they both had several allergies. But they often loved how my cooking smelled, and so I made a list of their restrictions so I could accommodate them. As we all settled into living together, I tried to find recipes we could all eat, or made small tweaks that worked with their diet. We ate stuffed peppers with cabbage leaves; for his birthday, I made my family’s eggless applesauce cake with gluten-free flour. By the end of my four months there, they were trying to include me in their detailed weekly meal plans.

It took compromise, for all of us. But looking back, it seems like all the times we three felt most connected involved either food or the kitchen or both. Whether any of us acknowledge it or not, God’s plan for food seems to keep reasserting itself. Perhaps that’s why Jesus most often depicted heavenly life as a massive feast, a theme John later takes up with his allusions to the marriage supper of the Lamb.

Revelation ends with the promise of food restored, after all. In its final chapter, the tree of life, whose fruit caused God to banish humans from Eden, reappears (Gen. 3:22, Rev. 22:2). Only once God resumes sharing that food with humans does the Bible declare the curse no more, and God and humans so close that “they will see his face.”

Anna Broadway is the author of Solo Planet: How Singles Help the Church Recover Our Calling and Sexless in the City: A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity.

The post It Is Not Best for Man to Eat Alone appeared first on Christianity Today.

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There is a beautiful garden in perfect bloom, existing somewhere outside of time and place. There, four pagan gods have gathered together for an intense, six-day Platonic symposium about the nature of the mind and the spiritual world (after which they will rest on the seventh day).

This in a nutshell is the setting and the organizational premise, old and new all at once, of David Bentley Hart’s new book, All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life. Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, explores the philosophy and theology of the mind in a manner that delights, bewilders, confuses, and alarms—sometimes separately and sometimes all at once.

The Archaic Greek philosopher Thales once said, “All things are full of gods.” For Thales, this notion was perfectly compatible with his scientific inquiry into astronomy, mathematics, and more.

The nod to Thales in the book’s title is appropriate. As Hart notes in his introduction in a sentence whose intimidatingly elaborate erudition—and sheer length—captures the style of his prose throughout:

Before the advent and eventual triumph of the mechanical philosophy in early modernity, and then the gradual but more or less total triumph of a materialist metaphysics of nature (even among those who believe in a realm beyond the merely physical), most developed philosophies, East and West alike, presumed that mind or something mindlike, transcendent or immanent or both, was the more original truth of things, pervading, sustaining, and giving existence to all that is.

As Hart recognizes, embracing the supremacy of the mind in all its mysterious glory doesn’t necessarily entail any new theological or philosophical discoveries. Instead, it involves dusting off and recovering something very old—pre-Christian, even. The idea of miracles, the acceptance of supernatural realities, and the need for mediators between gods and normal humans have all been features of human life and belief for millennia.

The Realest RealityMichael Horton’s new book, Shaman and Sage, which I coincidentally read right before picking up Hart’s volume, is a good companion piece here, as it confirms the longstanding human bend toward the spiritual (but not necessarily religious). Indeed, the extreme contemporary skeptics, so quick to dismiss the reality of anything intangible or invisible, belong squarely in the historical minority. For much of human existence, people were more Thales than Richard Dawkins—seeing no conflict between the world of science and the mysterious unseen all around.

The spiritual state, then, seems to occur more or less naturally. By the end of Hart’s book, nevertheless, I felt that I could best relate to Hephaestus, the pagan metalsmith god Hart casts as the supporter of the material world. Hephaestus’s main conversationalist is Psyche, the goddess of the soul—that is, indeed, what her name literally means. (Also present at Hart’s imagined dialogue but less outspoken are Eros, the god of love and Psyche’s husband, and Hermes, the messenger god.)

It is Psyche who drives Hart’s main argument throughout this volume—that the spiritual and invisible world is true, and it is much more real than the physical and tangible world so ardently championed by modern philosophies. The argument for the latter also usually goes hand in hand with the exclusion of the divine and supernatural. Accordingly, Psyche’s journey to prove the reality of the life of the mind is inextricably connected with her axiom that the divine is everywhere.

As Hart says,

a truly scrupulous phenomenology of mental agency discloses an absolute engagement of the mind in an infinite act of knowing that is nothing less than the source and end of all three of these realities [i.e., life, mind, and language], and indeed of all things; or, to say this more simply, all acts of the mind are participations in the mind of God.

But when I say that I could best relate to Hephaestus by the book’s end, I do not mean that I am wholly persuaded by his materialist stance—that has never fully appealed to me. Rather, I find that, like him, I am lost in all the arguments Psyche (or, rather, Hart) presents. To say that this book broke my brain would be an understatement.

In many ways, All Things Are Full of Gods—brain-breaking tendencies included—is classic Hart. Stunningly twisting Ciceronian sentences, of the sort I have quoted in this review, might span an entire paragraph, enticing the reader with the beauty of their phrasing. Still, it is a beauty that one cannot fully or easily comprehend, as I often realized upon reaching such a one’s end. I understand, I think, the overall premises and arguments of the book; I struggled, however, to understand many individual sentences in full. But then, as Hart notes, language too is a mystery.

The evolution of Hart’s thought and brilliance is on full display, nevertheless, as he continues his decades-long exploration of the divine across traditions, offering in All Things Are Full of Gods a recognizable sequel to such earlier books as Atheist Delusions, The Experience of God, and, to a lesser extent, That All Shall Be Saved.

Here, Hart’s meditation—for this book is more a meditation in dialogue form than any sort of traditional argument—centers around two essential premises that Psyche painstakingly tries to prove by drawing on examples from the past two and a half millennia of philosophy. First, that God and the divine or spiritual world are intensely, palpably real. Second (and most important), that the visible world is not all that there is—in fact, the things unseen are more real.

The mind is greater than the body. As Psyche puts it early in the dialogue, “Whatever the nature of matter may be, the primal reality of all things is mind.” But this idea, Hart is convinced, is not unique to any one tradition; rather, it is universal in premodernity. And so, Psyche concludes, “Ātman is Brahman—which I take to be the first, last, most fundamental, and most exalted truth of all real philosophy and religion alike.”

Such beautiful yet loaded statements are what have previously embroiled Hart in charges of heresy. For instance, he has been accused of universalism (the belief in universal salvation), a stance he seems to defend most vehemently in That All Shall Be Saved. And Hart’s new book contains more than a whiff of what one article criticized as Hart’s “Post-Christian Pantheism.”

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Drawing Protestant conclusionsWhat do we make of it all—the dialogue of four pagan gods about the nature of the divine, about the thinking life, and about the nature of reality and the search for wonder in the modern world? This choice of conversationalists to present Hart’s argument is certainly thought-provoking. But perhaps we overthink this remarkable project and its intended meaning if we focus entirely on the premise of four pagan gods in conversation.

Ultimately, the theme that comes through is that of mystery—a transcendent sort of question without an exact answer. What is the meaning of life, of exploration, and even of our very existence? Psyche’s informed answers to question after question from Hephaestus are kaleidoscopic, expanding into seemingly infinite worlds swirling within, but mainly lead to this conclusion: There is no clear comprehensible answer. The thinking life is wonderfully rich—or at least it can be if we leave ourselves open to endless questions, as Hart encourages.

At the end, I was left with the Protestant Sunday school question: Where is Jesus in all this? In the words of hymnwriter Fanny Crosby, we can proclaim, “Take the world, but give me Jesus”—a statement that can read as a Protestant variation on Hart’s overall argument about spiritual reality surpassing the physical.

But Hart is not a Protestant. And perhaps that is what irks his critics most. For all his brilliance, we cannot fully know Hart’s mind, and so critics guess. I will refrain. But I do know that after reading this book, I can still readily draw Protestant conclusions about the transcendent beauty of the Creator God who has made all things. While I would not agree with Thales in a literal sense—that “all things are full of gods”—I can agree with the God of Genesis through Revelation, whose Word, in Isaiah 6:3, says that “the whole earth is full of his glory.”

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

The post David Bentley Hart’s Brain-Breaking Argument for the Supremacy of the Mind appeared first on Christianity Today.

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100,000 Americans died from April 2020 to April 2021 due to opioids, according to numbers released this week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The majority of the deaths have come via fentanyl, which accounted for more than 75 percent of all fatalities. Most of the time fentanyl has been used in combination with drugs like methamphetamine or cocaine. Who were those who lost their lives? According to the New York Times: The vast majority of these deaths, about 70 percent, were among men between the ages of 25 and 54. And while the opioid crisis has been characterized as one primarily impacting white Americans, a growing number of Black Americans have been affected as well. There were regional variations in the death counts, with the largest year-over-year increases — exceeding 50 percent — in California, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, West Virginia and Kentucky. Vermont’s toll was small, but increased by 85 percent during the reporting period. This week on Quick to Listen, we wanted to talk about the opioid crisis. What is our response as Christians who are in relationship with those affected? What is our responsibility when we are far away? Andrea “Andi” Clements is professor and assistant chair of the psychology department at East Tennessee State University and is co-founder of Uplift Appalachia, which helps churches care for addicted people. She is on the leadership team of the Strong BRAIN Institute, which studies childhood resilience. Clements joined global media manager Morgan Lee and executive editor Erik Petrik to discuss when she first realized that opioid addiction had entered her community, why churches are part of the solution to the crisis, and how being in relationship with the addicted has changed her faith. What is Quick to Listen? Read more. Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow this week's hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Read Ted's Precious Moments article: What Steadfast Looks Like in a Revolution Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Faith Ndlovu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last Friday, both chambers of Congress passed an infrastructure bill that will commit more than one trillion dollars to America’s deteriorating roads and bridges, making life easier for pedestrians and bikers, improving broadband access, and renovating suffering public transit systems. This bill has been closely tied to Biden’s Build Better Back, legislation that would invest heavily in climate change and social policies. While the bill had passed the Senate in July, Progressive Democrats in the House had wanted to hold out on passing the bill until Build Better Back first passed.But mustering support for that initiative has been challenging for Democrats, including from within their own party. Last week, West Virginia senator Joe Manchin suggested his refusal to support the bill was because it didn’t share enough of the other side’s interests. "While I've worked hard to find a path to compromise, it's obvious: Compromise is not good enough for a lot of my colleagues in Congress. It's all or nothing, and their position doesn't seem to change unless we agree to everything," Manchin said in a press conference. Though Manchin and fellow Democrat Arizona senator Krysten Sinema have insisted that their holding out is part of a commitment to look out for the interests of everyone, some suggest that their posture is actually selfish."It is simply not fair, not right that one or two people say: My way or the highway," said Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. Amy E. Black is professor of political science at Wheaton College and author of several books, including Honoring God in Red or Blue: Approaching Politics with Humility, Grace, and Reason. Black joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss what compromise is, why Christians often make it harder for Christian leaders to practice it, and why politicans have become so loathe to work across the aisle. What is Quick to Listen? Read more. Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow this week's hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Faith Ndlovu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Politicians, business leaders, and activists from around the world are meeting this and next week in Glasgow, Scotland, to make commitments and urge others to do the same to keep the planet from overheating more than it already is. Earth’s global temperature has risen 1.1 C and as the planet has warmed, fires have raged in Australia and California, heatwaves and floods have killed hundreds around the world. So what can be done to keep the temperature from rising .4 or more degrees? Christians have been actively petitioning God for prayer. Believers in Asia, Europe, and North America gathered monthly from spring to fall to offer intercessory prayers ahead of the United Nations climate change conference, in an event organized by Lausanne/World Evangelical Alliance Creation Care Network, A Rocha International, Youth With A Mission England, Christian Missionary Fellowship International, Tearfund, and Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. The Young Christian Climate Network organized about 2,000 people to walk between the southwestern tip of the UK to Glasgow to raise awareness about climate change and the current practices leading the earth’s rise in temperature. Philip Summerton is a full time missionary worker with YWAM in Scotland and a marine and terrestrial conservationist who has done work on the restoration of coral reefs in the Seychelles. Summerton joined global media manager Morgan Lee and news editor Daniel Silliman to discuss the goals of COP26, what’s impeding us from reaching them, and why the climate movement needs Christians. What is Quick to Listen? Read more. Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow this week's hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Daniel Silliman Learn more about YWAM Scotland Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Faith Ndlovu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This week, the revelations from a number of internal Facebook documents came to light, thanks to Frances Haugen, a former employee of the social media giant. The documents reveal that the organization, as The Washington Post summarized, “privately and meticulously tracked real-world harms exacerbated by its platforms, ignored warnings from its employees about the risks of their design decisions and exposed vulnerable communities around the world to a cocktail of dangerous content.” Chris Martin is content marketing editor at Moody Publishers. He studies internet culture and the effects of social media on broader society for fun. He is publishing a book with B&H Publishing in February called Terms of Service that is in the same vein as this newsletter. Martin joined global media manager Morgan Lee and executive editor Ted Olsen to discuss the revelations that these documents show, what this means for all of us regardless of whether we’re on Facebook or not, and if there’s a “Christian” way to react to this news.What is Quick to Listen? Read more. Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow this week's hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Chris Martin Subscribe to his Substack: Terms of Service Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Faith Ndlovu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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On Saturday, a gang kidnapped 17 North American missionaries in Haiti as the party returned from an orphanage in a suburb of Port-au-Prince. Since then, the group, known as 400 Mawozo, has demanded a ransom of $17 million for the victims, who include five men, seven women, and five children. While many locals have been kidnapped in recent years as security on the country’s roads has been increasingly threatened, this incident has drawn significant international attention. This kidnapping comes roughly two months after US troops withdrew from Afghanistan. America’s departure and the chaos that ensued led many expats, including aid workers and missionaries, to leave the country. Anna Hampton is the author of Facing Danger: A Guide Through Risk, which is based on her doctoral dissertation at Trinity Seminary in Newburg. She’s been in full-time ministry for 28 years, more than 17 of those years in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey and other parts of Central Asia and the Middle East. She and her family are now based in the US, but still doing work in Central Asia, so Anna Hampton is a pseudonym. Hampton joined global media manager Morgan Lee and executive editor Ted Olsen to discuss how the Bible discusses risk, what has shaped Western Christians’ perspectives on this issue, and how saviorism affects how we make these decisions. What is Quick to Listen? Read more. Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow this week's hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Faith Ndlovu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Season 1 and Season 2 spoilers ahead. The second season of Ted Lasso ends with an image of Nate. The once kitman, recently promoted Greyhounds assistant coach is not wearing Richmond attire as we see him lead team exercises on the pitch. Instead, he’s in all black, staring at the camera, as we realize he’s the head coach of Westham United, the team recently purchased by season one nemesis Rupert Mannion. Just minutes before, we’ve watched Nate verbally berate Ted during halftime in a game that could put Richmond back in the Premiere League. Nate’s arc, from neglected staff member to dismissive and arrogant coach, who struggles with self-loathing and insecurity, is just one of the themes we want to discuss. But a show known for the kindness and forgiveness of its characters also had much to say this year about toxic masculinity and father and son relationships. The program has also had much to say about actions and consequences, except that we feel that there were a few oversights here this season. Marybeth Baggett is professor of English and Cultural Apologetics at Houston Baptist University and an associate editor for Christ and Pop Culture. Her 2019 book Morals of the Story received a CT Award of Merit in our Book Awards. And she’s working on a book about the philosophy of Ted Lasso with her husband, who is also at Houston Baptist. Baggett joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss how the show defines redemption, why it focused so much on father-son relationships, and what Nate can teach Christians about love.What is Quick to Listen? Read more. Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow this week's hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Read Morgan’s Ted Lasso article: ‘Ted Lasso’ Won’t Settle for Shallow Optimism Follow our guest on Twitter: Marybeth Davis Baggett Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Faith Ndlovu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This week, Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, announced that he would retire at the end of the year. An evangelical Christian who previously worked as the head of the Human Genome Project, Collins’ 2009 appointment still drew scorn. From a 2010 profile in the New Yorker: Collins read in the Times that many of his colleagues in the scientific community believed that he suffered from “dementia.” Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, questioned the appointment on the ground that Collins was “an advocate of profoundly anti-scientific beliefs.” P. Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota at Morris, complained, “I don’t want American science to be represented by a clown.” Nevertheless, Collins served under three presidential administrations. During the pandemic, Collins has spoken out a number of times in his efforts to dispel misconceptions about the virus and vaccine.  Prior to his term at the NIH, Collins was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He also wrote the best-selling book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, which won a CT Book Award.  Elaine Howard Ecklund joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss Collins’s legacy in the scientific and Christian communities. What is Quick to Listen? Read more . Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow this week's hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Faith Ndlovu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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In this third decade of the 21st century, we’ve seen a lot of religious scandals, with Christian leaders abusing their power and position. Too many. Nevertheless, still to this day when you say the words religious scandal—more often than not folks will think of two television personalities of the 1970s and ’80s: Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. The “Jim and Tammy” show was the basis of what became a massive ministry and theme park in Fort Mill, South Carolina. It was called PTL, an abbreviation that stood both for Praise the Lord and for People That Love. Then came revelations that PTL had been massively and illegally misusing funds, diverting church funds to pay for their extravagant lifestyle and selling more lifetime vacations at the theme park than the theme park could possibly support. At about the same time, The Charlotte Observer also revealed that Jim Bakker had been engaging in extramarital sex and that ministry funds had been used for hush money. The Assemblies of God kicked them out of the denomination. Jim Bakker went to jail. During Jim’s imprisonment, the couple divorced. Tammy Faye, meanwhile, became a kind of campy celebrity, appearing in a VH1 reality TV show, hosting a syndicated talk show, and becoming a kind of gay icon. In the year 2000, seven years before her death, a documentary came out called The Eyes of Tammy Faye, narrated by drag queen star RuPaul. Last week, a biopic based on that documentary came out with the same title: The Eyes of Tammy Faye. It’s directed by Michael Showalter, stars Jessica Chastain, and is getting a fair bit of buzz for its highly sympathetic portrayal of Tammy Faye as a misunderstood and maligned Christian woman. Christianity Today’s Ted Olsen and Kate Shellnutt talked about Tammy Faye’s enduring appeal with Leah Payne, associate professor of theology at George Fox University and Portland Seminary. She is author of Gender and Pentecostal Revivalism, is working on a book on CCM for Oxford University Press and cohosts the Weird Religion podcast. What is Quick to Listen? Read more. Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts. Follow the podcast on Twitter. Follow this week's hosts on Twitter: Ted Olsen and Kate Shellnutt. Follow our guest, Leah Payne. Music by Sweeps. Quick to Listen was produced this week by Ted Olsen and Matt Linder. The transcript is edited by Faith Ndlovu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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On August 29, as American troops were accelerating their pullout from Afghanistan, the U.S. military ordered its last drone strike in the 20 year war. The missile destroyed a parked car that military officials said was operated by an Islamic State sympathizer, and contained explosives for a suicide attack on the Kabul airport, where American forces and civilians had gathered for evacuation. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told a news conference, “We think that the procedures were correctly followed and it was a righteous strike.” Last week, separate investigations from The New York Times and The Washington Post questioned those assertions, reporting that the driver was Zemari Ahmadi, a longtime engineer for the California-based aid group Nutrition and Education International. The supposed explosives, said the Times, were canisters of water Ahmadi was bringing home to his family because Taliban’s takeover of the city had cut off his neighborhood’s water. The Times also reported that 10 members of the Ahmadi family were killed in the Hellfire missile attack, including seven children. General Milley told reporters, “We went through the same level of rigor that we've done for years. Yes, there are others killed. Who they are, we don't know. We'll try to sort through all that.” The British-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has counted that the US military conducted more than 13,000 drone strikes in Afghanistan over the years, with at least 4,126 people killed, including at least 300 civilians and 66 children. Drone policies changed over the years under during different presidencies. As did the way the US counted civilian deaths by drone strikes. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan has a dramatically higher count for civilians killed in Afghanistan by drones: more than 2,000, with more 785 of them children. If accurate, that would mean that about 40 percent of civilians killed by drones in Afghanistan were children. It appears that drone warfare will continue to play a major role in Afghanistan. Earlier this month, President Biden promised Islamic State—or ISIS-K, “We are not done with you yet. … We will hunt you down to the ends of the Earth, and you will pay the ultimate price.” But without troops in the country, that hunting will almost certainly be done mostly through unmanned aircraft. Back in 2011, CT ran a story asking “Is it wrong to kill by remote control?” This week, we want to revisit that question. Our guest this week is Paul D. Miller, is professor of the practice of international affairs at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He earlier served in the US army, the CIA, and on the National Security Council staff as director for Afghanistan and Pakistan. These days, in addition to his post at Georgetown, he is a research fellow with the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and is author of Just War and Ordered Liberty, published earlier this year from Cambridge University Press. Among that book’s chapters is one one on the ethics of drone warfare. Quick to Listen listeners may also remember Dr. Miller from our January episode on Christian Nationalism. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow this week's hosts on Twitter: Ted Olsen and Andy Olsen Follow our guest Paul D. Miller Music by Sweeps. Quick to Listen was produced this week by Ted Olsen and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Faith Ndlovu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This year marks 20 years since 19 men hijacked four planes, driving two of the aircraft into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and one into a field in Pennsylvania, after several of the passengers fought back. The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and left 25,000 people injured and were organized by Osama bin Laden, who used his faith as justification for the attacks. Several days after September 11, 2001, President Bush addressed the country: These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it's important for my fellow Americans to understand that. The English translation is not as eloquent as the original Arabic, but let me quote from the Koran, itself: In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil. For that they rejected the signs of Allah and held them up to ridicule. The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war. When we think of Islam we think of a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. Billions of people find comfort and solace and peace. And that's made brothers and sisters out of every race. Under the Bush administration, the US initiated the “War on Terror” which carried out a number of military inventions around the world to fight Islamic extremism, which included invading and occupying two majority Muslim nations, Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, all of this political rhetoric and direct action had significant consequences for how the country and church engaged Muslims domestically and internationally.Thomas Kidd is the author of American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism (Princeton University Press, 2008) and works at Baylor University where is a distinguished professor of history, the James Vardaman endowed professor of history and the associate director of Institute for Studies of Religion. His most recent book is Who Is an Evangelical?: The History of a Movement in Crisis. Kidd joined global media manager Morgan Lee and executive editor Ted Olsen to discuss how American evangelicals interacted with Muslim before 9/11 and what has changed since. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest Thomas Kidd Music by Sweeps. Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Faith Ndlovu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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In recent weeks, some Americans sick with COVID-19 have been looking for a cure from a very unorthodox source: ivermectin. Here’s how the Food and Drug Administration described the situation in a letter to veterinarians and animal health retailers this week: People are purchasing various highly concentrated animal ivermectin drug formulations such as “pour-on,” injectable, paste, and “drench” that are intended for horses, cattle, and sheep, and taking these drugs has made some people very sick. Even if animal drugs have the same active ingredient as an approved human drug, animal drugs have not been evaluated for safety or effectiveness in humans. Treating human medical conditions with veterinary drugs can be very dangerous. The drug may not work at all, or it could worsen the illness and/or lead to serious, potentially life-threatening health complications. People should not take products approved for veterinary use, “for research only,” or otherwise not for human consumption. Fox News as well as other conservative news outlets and radio personalities have promoted this cure. Among those was Phil Valentine, who recently died from COVID-19. He also was not vaccinated and urged his listeners to resist the vaccine. What are people looking to such unusual and potentially dangerous forms of treatment? Do people know when they’re acting foolishly...or becoming a fool? Dominick Hérnandez is associate professor of Old Testament at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University and author of Proverbs: Pathways to Wisdom. Hérnandez joined global media manager Morgan Lee and executive editor Ted Olsen to discuss fools, folly, and how the book of Proverbs might help us in our current environment where we see people all around us making decisions that make no sense to us. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest: Dominick Hérnandez Music by Sweeps. Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Faith Ndlovu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Here's a special, stand-alone Slow to Speak where guest host Kate Shellnutt joins Morgan Lee to read over listener feedback from Episode 271: Critical Race Theory: What Christians Need to Know. If you have feedback for us about any episode, we'd love to hear from you. You can email us at podcasts@christianitytoday.com. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Kate Shellnutt Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This spring and summer, a lot of headlines about the economy sang a similar tune: From CNN: Why American workers don't want to go back to normal The Wall Street Journal: Job Openings Are at Record Highs. Why Aren’t Unemployed Americans Filling Them? The New York Times: Why Aren’t People Going Back to Their Jobs? The Washington Post: It’s not a ‘labor shortage.’ It’s a great reassessment of work in America. Across the country, hundreds of companies and businesses, many of them in the hospitality and service industry, were searching for employees. And they weren’t finding them. Some state governments began to halt the federal government’s unemployment funds, worried that the cash was disincentivizing unemployed people from working. Companies and businesses began to raise salaries and add benefits. But many people weren’t persuaded; they weren’t going back to their pre-pandemic line of work. One restaurant worker in Austin told The Washington Post: “The staffing issue has actually a lot more to do with the conditions that the industry was in before covid and people not wanting to go back to that, knowing what they would be facing with a pandemic on top of it. People are forgetting that restaurant workers have actually experienced decades of abuse and trauma. The pandemic is just the final straw.” Many of us, especially those of us who are professionals, may believe our work matters...or at least it ought to. We’ve heard Christian leaders make the case for work glorifying God and theological arguments being made to stir us to good work. But is this always the case? Has this framework, instead, ever been used to dehumanize and exploit workers? Luke Bobo serves as vice president of networks for Made to Flourish, a ministry that helps pastors and churches better understand work, and economics in light of their faith. He is the author of Living Salty and Light Filled Lives in the Workplace, A Layperson’s Guide to Biblical Interpretation, and Race, Economics and Apologetics. Bobo joined global media manager Morgan Lee and executive editor Ted Olsen to discuss if the Bible’s instructions about work make sense today, what is different about work in this moment, and how to navigate the additional abuse and exhaustion the pandemic has brought on. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest Luke Bobo Music by Sweeps. Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Faith Ndlovu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Earlier this year, Joe Biden announced that after close to 20 years, the United States would be withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan. Last week, as the military began its exit, the Taliban was ready and within days had seized control of the country. The ascent sparked widespread fear and led to thousands arriving at the airport only to find their flights out of the country had been canceled. Some even grabbed a hold of the aircraft in desperation. Biden defended the decision, arguing that Afghanistan’s leaders "gave up and fled the country." He also said: "The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight. If anything, the developments in the past week reinforced ending that US military involvement Afghanistan now was the right decision.” He did concede: "The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.” As the government fell, it was not clear if the US had done anything to protect those who had worked with the military as translators. Plans to resettle Afghans as refugees seemed to be formulated in real time. The rights of women and girls which were suppressed under the Taliban’s previous time in power also appeared in jeopardy. And the lives of Christians, who according to official numbers only make up a miniscule number of the country’s nearly 40 million people, seem in peril as well. David Paiman is an Afghan pastor and evangelist. You can follow his ministry here. Paiman joined global media manager Morgan Lee and news editor Daniel Silliman to discuss how he converted from Islam to Christianity, the withdrawal’s consequences for the church in Afghanistan, and how we can best support the country and people during this time. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow David’s ministry on Facebook Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Faith Ndlovu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This week, the Christian Post reprinted a blog by Samuel Sey, a Canadian writer, entitled, “Why I am not getting the vaccine.” Sey’s essay didn’t address the scientific concerns he has with the vaccines, though he says he has hired a fitness trainer and is working on maintaining a healthier diet. But the piece is largely in response to several Canadian provinces instituting vaccine passports. When our governments infringe on some of our rights without any significant or collective pressure for them to stop, we tempt them to violate all our rights and freedoms.That is partly why I am not getting the vaccine. The more our governments and culture attempt to force me to get the vaccine, the more unwilling I am to get it. I want our politicians and public health officials to convince me to get the vaccine. I don’t want them to coerce me into getting it.After all, if I violate my conscience concerning the vaccine because of social pressure, that will surely make me vulnerable to violating my conscience on other issues because of social pressure. Sey’s arguments echo those of many who have argued that their conscience has been violated by vaccine mandates, mask mandates, or church closures. Of course, others might argue that implementing or following these decisions or policies enables them to follow their convictions. This week on Quick to Listen, we wanted to discuss our consciences: when are they reliable? When are they not reliable? And how should we react when someone following their conscience seemingly violates our own? Julien C. H. Smith is associate professor of humanities and theology at Valparaiso University’s Christ College, and author of the new book Paul and the Good Life: Transformation and Citizenship in the Commonwealth of God. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Faith Ndlovu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Due to production issues, we are not running a new podcast today. Instead, we are replaying a unfortunately, once-again-timely episode we recorded last year about California’s devastating forest fires. We’ll see you all next week with a fresh episode. Unless you’ve actually been in an area where you can look out your window and see the view with your own eyes, by now you’ve caught images of an orange sky coming from West Coast. For the past week, hundreds of miles of California, Oregon, Washington, and neighboring states have been covered in smokey air as forest fires rage, driving thousands of people from their homes. More than a dozen people have died in these historically catastrophic fires.As climate change has increasingly worsened fire season, it’s changed how Paige Parry, associate professor of Biology at George Fox University, makes sense of these disasters.“ We know that humans are what’s contributing to the fires,” said Parry. “So in my head, that makes my response and the questions that I ask very different than maybe a disaster that's truly natural and not influenced at all by human action.”Parry, a quantitative forest ecologist, has spent most of her life and research in the West.“ Within this context of feeling like we have so little control over the situations that are unfolding here on the West Coast and feeling like we're just victims of these fires ravaging, there's a part of me that also recognizes that our collective actions and choices have in some ways likely contributed to the situation that we've found ourselves in, which I think leaves us to wrestle with it in a very different way,” she said. Parry joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss why these fires have grown increasingly worse, what types of consequences the fires have even after they’ve been extinguished, and how a Christian response to fires may look different in the wake of climate change. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Learn more about our guest: Paige Parry Visit our guest’s website: The Parry Lab Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Leeand Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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After one vault on Tuesday, Simone Biles took herself out of the US gymnastics women’s team competition. A day later, she withdrew from the all-around, “in order to focus on her mental health,” read a statement on the USA Gymnastics' Twitter account. Simone also blamed the twisties, where, as the Washington Post describes, athletes “lose control of their bodies as they spin through the air. Sometimes they twist when they hadn’t planned to. Other times they stop midway through, as Biles did. And after experiencing the twisties once, it’s very difficult to forget. Instinct gets replaced by thought. Thought quickly leads to worry. Worry is difficult to escape.” While the majority of fans have reacted to Biles’ departure from these marquee competitions with support, it did draw scorn from some, who see her decision not to compete as quitting or a cop out. As with everything else these days, Biles’ decision became part of the culture wars. And no doubt her decision will make its way into countless sermon illustrations this weekend. This week on the show, we wanted to talk about how our discussion of elite athletics shapes the way we think about Christian discipleship. And when we hear words like sacrifice and redemption in our culture, it’s most often in a sports context. How is that shaping the way the church is talking about those words? Brian Gamel is a postdoctoral fellow at Baylor University’s Faith and Sports Institute, where he is writing a book on athletic imagery in the New Testament. He also wrote a piece for Christian Scholar’s Review earlier this year called “‘Whoever Wishes to Become Great’ – Sports, Glory, and the Gospel.” Tim Dalrymple is the CEO and editor in chief of Christianity Today. He is also a former elite gymnast: When he was a sophomore at Stanford, he was the NCAA’s top-ranked gymnast and a likely Olympics contender, until an accident on the high bar broke his neck and ended his athletic career. Gamel and Dalrymple joined global media manager Morgan Lee and executive editor Ted Olsen to discuss Paul’s athletic metaphors, a biblical theology of the body and sport, and what it means to actually support athletes in your church.What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow Tim Dalrymple on Twitter Email our guest: Brian_Gamel@baylor.edu Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Faith Ndlovu  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This Tuesday, Amazon founder and the richest man on the planet, Jeff Bezos, entered space for the first time. This was the virgin flight for Blue Origin, the space travel company that Bezos founded, and lasted 10 minutes and 10 seconds. Bezos's trip came just days after billionaire Richard Branson reached the edge of space on board his Virgin Galactic rocket plane. The company currently has more than 600 reservations, a trip that costs his commercial passengers, $250,000 apiece. The company hopes to launch to the public next year. While the White House called Bezos’s flight a “moment of American exceptionalism,” others have been less than thrilled to see the wealthiest in the country head into the heavens.  “Watching the coverage of the billionaires going to space and the notion that it may pave the way for all of us to go in the future. Can I just ask why they think everyone would want to go to space for 8 minutes? And how is this a good use of millions of $? How bout curing cancer?,” wrote former World Vision head Richard Stearns in a series of tweets. “It is estimated that Bezos spent $5.5 billion to achieve his space flight. That same amount of money could have brought clean water to 110 million people who currently have no access. It could also have given a $4000 raise to every one of Amazon’s 1.3mm employees.” After his flight, Bezos thanked “every Amazon employee, and every Amazon customer. Because you guys paid for all this.” Bezos says he funds Blue Origin by selling $1 billion of Amazon stock annually. Mark J. Shelhamer is former chief scientist of NASA’s Human Research Program. He is professor of otolaryngology, head and neck surgery, at Johns Hopkins University, where he is also director of the Human Spaceflight Lab. He most recently also became the director and founder of the Bioastronautics@Hopkins initiative. Shelhamer has been involved in human spaceflight research since the 1980s and serves as an adviser to commercial spaceflight federation. Shelhamer joined global media manager Morgan Lee and executive editor Ted Olsen to discuss whether Christians should celebrate billionaires in space, why not everyone was a fan of spaceflight when it first took off, and and how working in this industry has affected his relationship with God. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Read an essay from Mark Shelhamer Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Faith Ndlovu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Half a dozen Canadian churches have been set on fire or burned down this summer. This arson has come at a time when multiple mass graves have been found across the nation on the grounds of now-defunct residential schools. Operated by multiple churches, including the Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and United, the Canadian schools were part of a 20th-century government program to assimilate its First Nation community. The government forced students to attend, separating them from their families at a young age. Once there, they were forbidden from speaking their native language and punished severely if they ran away. Many died at the school from disease and suffered from hunger and physical abuse. The trauma brought on by these schools has carried on for generations. Much of it was shared during a Truth and Reconciliation Commission where survivors told stories of their time. Jimmy Thunder teaches indigenous ministry at Horizon College and Seminary in Saskatoon and is the founder of Reconciliation Thunder, a nonprofit focused on helping leaders respond to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action. Thunder joined global media manager Morgan Lee and executive editor Ted Olsen to discuss the Christian history of Canadian residential schools and learn how many First Nation people regard Christianity today. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Learn more about Reconciliation Thunder Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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On Wednesday, Haiti’s president Jovenel Moïse was assassinated. His death came after protesters had demanded his departure for months. Moïse had governed the country of 11 million by decree, even as constitutional scholars and legal experts argued that his term in office had already expired. While the country has long struggled with poverty and unrest, the situation had been exacerbated in recent months as violent gangs had kidnapped children and pastors. Haiti first became a nation after its enslaved population overthrew their French enslavers. But Western nations, scared lest they send the wrong message to the enslaved, launched a trade boycott against the country, greatly impoverishing it for decades. During the 20th century, the US occupied the island from 1915 to 1934. After it left, the country endured several dictatorships and western powers-supported government overthrows.The country has also not been rebuilt after an earthquake devastated it in 2011.Guenson and Claudia Charlot are co-pastors of Discipleship Evangelical Church. Guenson is the president of Emmaus University of Haiti and Claudia is the director of Hand Up Micro Credit. The Charlots joined global media manager Morgan Lee and executive editor Ted Olsen to discuss how Haiti’s hard history has affected its theology, what keeps the church going in the midst of political and socioeconomic despair, and how American missions organizations have helped and hurt the island. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Christians should be afraid of critical race theory. That’s the message that a number of conservative Christian leaders have shared in recent months. Last fall, the presidents of the five Southern Baptist seminaries issued a statement saying that “affirmation of Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality and any version of Critical Theory” is incompatible with the Baptist Faith and Message, the denomination’s core beliefs. This anxiety made CRT a main focus at the denomination’s recent gathering. In recent years, some evangelicals have identified critical race theory as an ascendent ideology in the church that is fundamentally at odds with Christian faith. This anxiety has been mirrored by many conservatives at large and the debate over this ideology has moved from the previous president’s public disgust of the ideology to state legislature measures that would ban it in schools. All of this comes months after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor have once again spurred both conversations about how the church ought to respond to racial injustice but also how the church should discuss this reality. One recurring concern for some Christians: that their fellow believers have adopted the worldview and talking points of critical race theory and Marxism. Over time, these charges have been lobbed by Christians at Christians, the latter of whom often feel like this language mischaracterizes the movement, miscasts their efforts, or unfairly shuts down conversations without a hard look at the issues actually at stake. D.A. Horton directs the intercultural studies program at Cal Baptist and serves as associate teaching pastor at The Grove Community Church in Riverside, California. His 2019 book, Intensional, presents a “kingdom” view of ethnic divisions and reconciliation. Horton has written a four-part series on Ed Stetzer’s blog, The Exchange, about CRT and Christian missions. Horton joined global media manager Morgan Lee and senior news editor Kate Shellnutt to discuss what critical race theory is, why it unnerves some Christians, and what can be done to help Christians stop talking past each other when it comes to addressing the reality of racial injustice. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Kate Shellnutt Follow our guest on Twitter: D.A. Horton Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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On October 14, 2014, Pastor Mark Driscoll resigned from Mars Hill, the Seattle-based church he had founded and led since 1996. Driscoll gained national attention for the popularity of his church in a largely secular part of the US, but also for his own brash, at times crude, irreverent, and caustic temperament. For years, to the public, this largely manifested in his sermons. But over time, rumors of his abusive leadership style began to emerge. Upon accepting his resignation, Mars Hill Church’s board of overseers stated that Driscoll had “been guilty of arrogance, responding to conflict with a quick temper and harsh speech, and leading the staff and elders in a domineering manner," but had "never been charged with any immorality, illegality or heresy. Most of the charges involved attitudes and behaviors reflected by a domineering style of leadership.”Prior to his resignation, church planting network Acts 29 had removed Driscoll, its founder, from leadership and Driscoll had also apologized for previous controversy, including plagiarism and making crude comments. After he stepped down, Mars Hill church disbanded, with many of the sites closing or becoming their own independent church. Today, Driscoll leads Trinity Church in Scottsdale, which he founded in 2016. This week on Quick to Listen, we wanted to revisit this story, partially because it’s the topic of a new Christianity Today twelve-part podcast called The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. But also because so many elements of this story remain influential in how the evangelical world works today. Mike Cosper is CT’s director of podcasts and the host of Cultivated and The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. Cosper joined global media manager Morgan Lee and executive editor Ted Olsen to discuss how masculinity played a role in Mars Hill’s popularity, why polity mattered to its success and struggles, and what happened to the church after its celebrity pastor departed. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Mike Cosper Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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More than 16,000 Southern Baptists met in Nashville this week for their convention’s annual meeting. The largest crowd in a quarter century, the meeting attracted significant mainstream media attention as tensions over critical race theory and sexual abuse went public. On Tuesday, Alabama pastor Ed Litton won a run-off to become the next president of the denomination. He faced Georgia pastor Mike Stone, a candidate supported by the Conservative Baptist Network, a group which has campaigned actively against perceived liberal drift and “woke” theology in the denomination. On Wednesday, a resolution to investigate 20 years of allegations of abuse claims mishandled by the Executive Committee was approved. It will also examine the two-year-old committee tasked with reviewing abuse and coverup as grounds for dismissal from the convention.This week on Quick to Listen, we will get into the inside baseball of this year’s Southern Baptist Convention meeting and why it matters for Christians outside of the denomination. Senior news editor Kate Shellnutt joined global media manager Morgan Lee and news editor Daniel Silliman to share what she learned from covering the convention this week.  What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Daniel Silliman Follow our guest on Twitter: Gerardo Martí Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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After more than 40 years leading Saddleback Church, Rick Warren has announced his retirement. “This is not the end of my ministry,” Warren told his congregants on Sunday. “It’s not even the beginning of the end. … We’re going to take one step at a time in the timing of God. … God has already blessed me more than I could ever possibly imagine. I don’t deserve any of it, and so this next transition in my life is something I am anticipating with zero regrets, zero fears, zero worries.” The Southern California-based megachurch has begun looking for Warren’s successor.Warren’s ministry has had national and international significance. He is the author of the best-selling The Purpose Driven Life. He championed evangelicals fighting AIDS overseas. After his son died of suicide in 2013, he and his wife Kay began a mental health ministry. Overall, Warren’s ministry has not been as polemical as many of his fellow Southern Baptist church leaders. But he faced controversy after praying at Obama’s 2008 inauguration after he campaigned against same sex marriage that same election cycle. Several months ago, he apologized for Saddleback’s children’s Sunday school curriculum video which used Asian culture stereotypes to teach kids about the Bible. Last month, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Al Mohler criticized Saddleback after it ordained three women as pastors. Gerardo Martí is professor of sociology at Davidson College and the author of numerous well regarded books, including The Deconstructed Church, American Blindspot, and The Glass Church. Martí joined global media manager Morgan Lee and news editor Daniel Silliman to discuss Southern California evangelicalism, how Warren reached the suburbs by looking at amusement parks, and what informed his political strategy during Trump’s presidency. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Daniel Silliman Follow our guest on Twitter: Gerardo Martí Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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China has expanded the number of children married couples can have to three. Home to nearly 1.4 billion people—or more than one billion more people than the US—the country is anxious about its future. Under its current demographic trajectory, China’s labor force is shrinking, numbers which concern economists and government officials. China first began to regulate its population in the late 1970s, under what become known as the one-child policy, although two-child exceptions were made to ethnic minorities and Han families in rural areas who had daughters first. In 2015, the government began to allow all families to have two children. Despite these changes to the law, births have fallen for four years in a row. And many share similar concerns about the lack of family leave and cost of daycare that American families do. In its announcement, the Communist party pledged to improve maternity leave and workplace protections for married couples seeking more children. Raymond Yang has been a house church pastor for 27 years. He is currently enrolled in a PhD program at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University and is a licensed counselor based in northeast China. He has done marriage and family counseling for more than 10 years. Yang joined global media manager Morgan Lee and senior news editor Kate Shellnutt to discuss why abortion is prevalent among Chinese Christians, why the church rarely talks about sex, and how his family made the agonizing decision to have two children. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Kate Shellnutt Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Across the country, American cities are unsuccessfully grappling with how best to address homelessness. This month, Austin criminalized sitting, lying, or camping in public. Sausalito, an upscale community in the Bay Area canceled its annual art festival when its location conflicted with the proposed place to relocate the homeless population that is currently living on the city’s waterfront. Los Angeles is considering moving forward with establishing a government-funded tent encampment. Nationally, here’s how The New York Times summed it up in March of this year."Homelessness in the United States rose for the fourth straight year, with about 580,000 people living on the streets or in temporary shelter at the start of 2020, according to an annual nationwide survey that was completed before the pandemic.But the report, which was released on Thursday, almost certainly underestimates the spread, depth and urgency of the crisis, and not by a little, federal officials warned.Beyond the myriad factors that leave people on streets, expiring COVID-19 moratoriums on evictions mean that millions may soon find themselves without housing. For decades, Christian ministries have served food and offered temporary housing to people experiencing homelessness. Whose needs have these organizations traditionally met? And how successful have they been?John Ashmen has served as the CEO of Citygate Network since 2007, previously known as the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions and is the author of Invisible Neighbors. Before he went to what’s now Citygate, he served in the COO role of the Christian Camp and Conference Association. Ashmen joined global media manager Morgan Lee and executive editor Ted Olsen to talk about why homelessness is getting worse, why Christians don’t always agree on the solutions, and what it means for the church to love its neighbor when trying to consider what is best for those on the street, local businesses, and the safety of all. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Learn more about our guest’s organization: Citygate Network Read John Ashmen’s interview at The Exchange Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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For the past two weeks, the world has had its eyes on the violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Each day, new headlines emerge of Hamas launching rockets from Gaza and Israel bombing the strip in return. More than 200 Palestinians and a dozen Israelis have died in the attacks. But before the aggression escalated into direct action, tensions had been simmering for weeks. Thirteen Palestinian families from a neighborhood in a disputed area of East Jersualem were facing potential eviction. Many Israeli families have already moved into this neighborhood. Israeli settlements on land Palestinians believe to be theirs has consistently been a wider source of grievance between the two communities.Then, two weeks ago, police raided the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem during Ramadan. The third-holiest site in Islam is also located on the same land as the Temple Mount, a location sacred to Jews. After 11 days of fighting, a cease-fire has been announced, which will likely halt the rockets and shelling for now. But it’s unlikely to heal the long term rifts between the communities. What’s more: hundreds of people now grieve loved ones, including more than 50 children, who were killed in the past two weeks. Salim Munayer is the executive director and founder of Musalaha Ministry of Reconciliation, which has been bringing Israelis and Palestinians together since 1990. Munayer is a Palestinian-Israeli who received his PhD from the Oxford Center of Mission Studies in the UK and has published several books on reconciliation, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Christians in Israel and the Palestinian Authority. He is also the peace and reconciliation network coordinator for Middle East and North Africa for the World Evangelical Alliance. Munayer joined global media manager Morgan Lee and executive editor Ted Olsen on Quick to Listen to discuss the roots of the violence, the role and responsibility of American Christians in this crisis, and what the ongoing conflict between Palestinians and Israelis can teach us about the racial division in the church. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Learn more about our guest’s organization: Musalaha Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last year, the US birthrate experienced its largest single-year drop in nearly 50 years. For years, America’s 2.1 fertility rate made it an outlier to other developed countries. But for the last decade, the number had begun trending downwards, plummeting to last year’s figure of 1.6 children per woman. These numbers entered the news the same week the New York Times published an essay by columnist Elizabeth Bruenig, “I Became a Mother at 25, and I’m Not Sorry I Didn’t Wait.” Many warmly received and shared the piece, which explores the author’s experience of learning she was pregnant and the many factors that have caused millennial women to delay children including economic concerns, higher education, race, and geography. But for others, it struck a nerve. One NYT commenter wrote, “There are few things more irresponsible than bringing a child into the world in 2021. I know it's difficult to reject the incredible social and cultural pressure that encourages us to reproduce. The easiest thing to do will always be to have children. But a good rule of thumb is that the easiest option-- the one our current paradigm encourages-- generally causes the most damage and suffering.” On Twitter, Jill Filipovic wrote, “I would really love to read more essays and op/eds from women (and men, too) who regret having children as early as they did, regret having as many as they did, or regret having children at all. There's not much about motherhood that remains publicly unexplored, but that does.” Rebecca McLaughlin is the author of Confronting Christianity, named Christianity Today's 2020 Beautiful Orthodoxy Book of the Year, and it's follow-up edition for youth, 10 Questions Every Teen Should Ask (and Answer) about Christianity. Her latest book is The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims. She joined global media manager Morgan Lee and executive editor Ted Olsen to discuss the challenges of talking about babies and motherhood in 2021 in the culture at large but also inside the church. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Rebecca McLaughlin Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Yvonne Su and Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last week, President Biden addressed Congress to stump for his latest proposal: The American Families Plan. If passed as is, the initiative would do the following:

Provide universal preschool for all three and four-year-olds

Offer two years of free community college to young adults

Cover childcare costs for families in poverty.

Set a $15 minimum wage for early childcare workers.

Mandate 12 weeks of paid parental, family and personal illness leave.

Make a summer food program serving children from low-income families permanent

This week on Quick to Listen, we wanted to dive deeper into Biden’s proposal. What is it trying to address? Who is it trying to serve? What changes should Christians see as wins for their own families and for their neighbors? And where should they push back or critique?Rachel Anderson is a resident fellow with the Center for Public Justice, leading the Families Valued project, where her work focuses on work and family policy and faith-based civic engagement. Anderson joined global media manager Morgan Lee and executive editor Ted Olsen to discuss why paid family leave has not been embraced in America, why so many churches are involved in early childhood education, and why family policy critics often take contrary positions on parents working or not. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Yvonne Su and Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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In 2019, 400,000 people around the world died of malaria. But it may never reach that high a number again. Early trials of a new vaccine have been shown to be 77 percent effective. This is not the first vaccine that has attempted to fight the deadly mosquito-transmitted disease. But it is the only one that has had this level of efficacy. This news comes when COVID-19 vaccines dominate the international discussion. Some wealthier nations, most notably the United States, have prioritized vaccinating their own people first. This week, however, the Biden administration did announce it would be sharing its enormous stockpile of Astrazenca doses. Other countries, like China and Russia, have been shipping their vaccines around the world, though some have questioned their efficacy. Many poorer countries have worried that they might wait years for their people to be vaccinated and be left with other countries’ lower-quality leftovers.It also comes as scientists have begun thinking through the ways MRNA technology, which was used to develop the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, might be used to combat other diseases. This week on Quick to Listen, we wanted to discuss the good news about the malaria vaccine, how this will affect Christian humanitarian work around the world, and what it looks like to be a good neighbor when it comes to vaccine distribution. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Yvonne Su and Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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On May 25 of 2020 police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds killing him. On Tuesday, a jury convicted him of all charges. The jury’s decision comes at a time when national attention is once again being paid to police brutality. On Sunday, a police officer in Minnesota shot and killed 20-year-old Duante Wright after reportedly confusing a taser and gun. Last week, Chicago released body cam footage of a police officer shooting 13-year-old Adam Toledo who appeared to have dropped his weapon and raised his hands. A video from December of two police officers pointing guns, pepper spraying, and pushing a black army officer during a traffic stop also circulated this month. These news stories also come at a time when several high profile mass shootings have devastated the country.In previous shows, we’ve talked about white evangelical attitudes towards police and the changing religious beliefs of many African American protesters leading the Black Lives Matter movement. This week on the show, we wanted to discuss the role that media has played in how we understand these phenomena and if it plays any role in perpetuating them. How has video coverage helped us better understand what is happening? How does it further divide and harden us? What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Bob Thomson Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Yvonne Su and Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Last Friday, a bill that would ban transgender athletes from competing in middle, high school, and college sports passed in the West Virginia legislature. At least 20 different state legislatures have introduced transgender athlete bans in 2021. While South Dakota’s governor Kristi Noem vetoed a proposed ban, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi have signed these changes into law.  Arkansas’ governor, Asa Hutchinson, did, however, veto legislation that would have banned gender confirming treatments or sex reassignment surgery for transgender youth under 18. That bill would have been the first in the country to ban this practice. Meanwhile, last Monday, GOP legislators in North Carolina introduced a bill that that would prevent doctors from performing sex reassignment surgery for transgender people under the age of 21.  This flurry of state bills—a month ago LGBT advocacy group Human Rights Campaign had counted more than 80—has once again provoked impassioned fighting, much of it centered around children. It’s led to questions of fairness in youth sports, if adolescent judgement and diagnosis should be trusted, and what role and what say parents should have in how their children express their gender. Mark Yarhouse is a pyschology professor at Wheaton College and the director of the Sexual and Gender Identity Institute. His books include Understanding Gender Dysphoria and most recently, Emerging Gender Identities. He joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen on this week’s episode of Quick to Listen. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Mark Yarhouse Go down Ted's music rabbit hole Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Yvonne Su and Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. This week, the number of Americans who have received their first dose of the vaccine will rise to one third of the population. As numbers continue to climb in the US and around the world, some churches will have to contend with yet another set of pandemic-spurred challenges. At what point will churches that have been meeting virtually go back to in-person meetings? At what point will in-person churches drop mask mandates or other COVID-19 protocol? As the vaccine opens up to all US adults, will they start requiring attendees to show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test before entry? And will white evangelical resistance to the vaccine subside? In February, 45 percent of this population said they would not be taking the vaccine, according to Pew Research Center. But beyond figuring out the logistics of in-person worship, churches will also have to contend with figuring out the role of their online ministries. Will they attempt to balance both? Or will one cannibalize the other? This week on Quick to Listen, we’ll be talking about the challenges pastors and church leaders face at this point in the pandemic, with Jay Kim, lead pastor of teaching at WestGate Church in California’s Silicon Valley and teacher-in-residence at Vintage Faith. He’s also the author of Analog Church: Why We Need Real People, Places, and Things in the Digital Age. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Jay Kim Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Yvonne Su and Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. This week, Protestants and Catholics around the world will celebrate Easter, once again in the midst of a global pandemic. At least 2.8 million people have died from COVID-19 and while many affluent countries have begun to vaccinate their people in earnest, this illness still defines most of public life. Because of Lent, many Christians have already been grappling with death in the context of their faith. But this week, the church will be once again sitting with the reality of Jesus’ death and his astonishing resurrection. Of course, for us believers, this astounding turn of events has life-changing ramifications for what comes after our physical deaths. But what does it mean for physical bodies as we inhabit them today? Does the Cross have any meaning for our physical health in this life? Stephen Ko is senior pastor at New York Chinese Alliance Church and formerly a professor of global health and pediatrics at Boston University and a medical officer at the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. He is the co-author of the forthcoming All Creation Groans (Wipf & Stock) and the author of the also forthcoming Incarnational Health . What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Steve Ko Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Yvonne Su and Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Last week, a gunman shot up three spas in Atlanta, taking the lives of eight people, six of them Asian American. Their names were Soon Chung Park, age 74; Hyun Jung Grant, age 51; Suncha Kim, age 69; Yong Yue, age 63; Delaina Ashley Yaun, age 33; Paul Andre Michels, age 54; and Xiaojie Tan, age 49.These attacks, coming just weeks after several reports were released calling attention to racial violence and harassment against Asian Americans. One report from a group called Stop AAPI Hate listed nearly 3,8000 incidents from March 19, 2020 to February 28, 2021 which included verbal harassment, physical assault, shunning, civil rights violations, and online harassment. While the community currently only makes up about six percent of the population, according to Pew Research Center, by 2055, this may be the largest minority group.It’s also a community with enormous amounts of diversity. The largest communities are ethnically Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese. This week on Quick to Listen, we wanted to learn more about the influence of Christian faith of Asian American, the US’ fasting growing immigrant group and the obligations of the church at large to welcome and love them. Our guest this week is Jane Hong, associate professor of history at Occidental College and the author of Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion. Her next book book from Oxford University Press is tentatively titled Model Christians, Model Minorities: Asian Americans, Race, and Politics in the Transformation of U.S. Evangelicalism. She is currently co-hosting Centering: The Asian American Christian Podcast. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Jane Hong Visit her faculty page Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Yvonne Su and Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Last month, the House of Representatives voted to approve the Equality Act. If passed, the bill would amend the Civil Rights Act to add sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity to its list of protected classes. The bill has broad implications on the rules for employment, housing, education, nonprofit groups that receive federal funds, and other areas. Many Christian leaders have opposed the bill but say they support expanding federal protections against discrimination. One example is Shirley Hoogstra, the president of the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities. She told The Washington Post this week “I have come to see that LGBTQ people should have the same ease of movement about their lives. They shouldn’t run into unexpected, dignity-dismissing episodes.” But Hoogstra and others are concerned that the Equality Act offers few protections for religious organizations and institutions that hold to traditional views of marriage and oppose things like gender reassignment surgeries .In fact, the Equality Act specifically says that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, a federal law written to directly protect religious freedom, can’t be used to challenge the Equality Act’s rules on sexuality. This week, as the bill went before the Senate Judiciary Committee, dozens of black Christian leaders published an open letter concerned that the bill would allow “LGBT rights to be used as a sword against faith institutions rather than a shield to protect the vulnerable.” Among the signers of that letter are the international religious freedom ambassador under the Obama administration, Suzan Johnson Cook and CT board member Claude Alexander. Shirley Mullen is president of Houghton College and serves on the board of several Christian institutions, including the National Association of Evangelicals and the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities. For many years she was provost at Westmont College, and is a historian of philosophical thought, with doctorates in both history and philosophy. Mullen joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss the specifics of the Equality Act and outline what comes next for religious institutions holding to a traditional sexual ethic and loving their neighbor in a pluralistic democracy. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Listen to Quick to Listen’s Episode on Fairness for Fall: If Religious Liberty and LGBT Activists Want to Move Forward, the Courts Won’t Help Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Yvonne Su and Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. On Sunday, millions watched Oprah interview Prince Harry and Megan, the Duchess of Sussex. Over the course of the conversation, the couple made several dramatic revelations, the majority about family members.

Meghan disclosed that there had been “concerns and conversations” between her husband and his family, the Royal family, about how dark their son’s skin might be.

Both Meghan and Harry talked about the challenges of convincing their relatives of the severity of the bad press they received and specifically of the toxicity of the racism leveled at their family. “If a member of his family would comfortably say ‘We’ve all had to deal with things that are rude’ — rude and racist are not the same,” said Meghan.

Meghan also added she dealt with suicidal thoughts and after seeking out the professional health at the palace’s HR department and, “I was told that I couldn’t, that it wouldn’t be good for the institution.”-Harry said after leaving the monarchy behind, he realized. “I was trapped but I didn’t know I was trapped,” he said. “My father and my brother, they are trapped. They don’t get to leave.”

He also said that his relationship with his father had suffered greatly over the years. At one point his father had stopped taking his calls. “I will always love him. But there’s a lot of hurt that’s happened and I will continue to make it one of my priorities to try and heal that relationship.”

With this conversation dominating the week’s news cycle, this week on Quick to Listen we wanted to talk about families, specifically adult children’s relationship with their parents. How does one honor their parents and live out the fifth commandment in 2021? What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Leslie Leyland Fields Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Yvonne Su and Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. In 2019, prime minister Abiy Ahmed won the Nobel Peace Prize. The committee noted that he had given amnesty to thousands of political prisoners, discontinued media censorship, fought against corruption, and legalized previously outlawed opposition groups. Ahmed also received attention for his religious reconciliation work which included mending a split in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and bringing together Christians and Muslims. The son of a Muslim father and Orthodox mother, Abiy is a Protestant Pentecostal, or “Pentay,” like many Ethiopian politicians. But, as of late, things have been tense. CNN recently reported that scores of people were murdered last November by whom survivors believe are soldiers from nearby Eritrea, whose presence they blame on the Ethiopian government. The massacre occurred in the Tigray region, the northern part of the country and one which shares a border with Eritrea. It came just weeks after the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front attacked Ethiopian military forces and the central government responded violently in return. Ethiopia has a long and extensive Christian history. The second country in the world to officially adopt Christianity, for 15 centuries, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has survived estrangement from Rome, the spread of Islam, and repeated colonialization attempts. There’s also millions of people, like Abiy, who identify as Protestant. Desta Heliso was born and raised in Ethiopia and has served as lecturer and director of the Ethiopian Graduate School of Theology. He currently resides in London but continues to coordinate the Centre for Ancient Christianity and Ethiopian Studies at EGST in Addis Ababa. He is also a fellow of the Center for Early African Christianity and a visiting lecturer at the London School of Theology. Heliso joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen this week to discuss this tragic and fraught conflict and to offer a robust picture of what Christianity looks like where more than 40 percent of the country identifies as Ethiopian Orthodox and nearly 25 percent as Protestant. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Desta Heliso Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Yvonne Su and Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Last week, conservative talk radio personality Rush Limbaugh died at age 70. Limbaugh’s nationally syndicated political show first hit the airwaves in the late 1980s. He was beloved by many who shared or later adopted his political views and his penchant for conspiracy theories. Many of his critics, however, pointed out his cruel and crass remarks. Limbaugh’s legacy was hardly limited to politics. In a tribute to him, one Christian leader wrote for USA Today, that “ Christian talk programs in particular wouldn't even exist today were it not for Limbaugh's success. Christian radio would still be limited to sermons and songs. But instead, radio stations realized the benefit of capturing even a slice of Limbaugh's audience share and offered new hosts and new voices opportunities to join a new, more democratic discussion of the issues.” Mark Ward Sr. is associate professor of communication at the University of Houston-Victoria in Victoria, Texas. His books include The Electronic Church in the Digital Age, Air of Salvation: The Story of Christian Broadcasting, and The Lord’s Radio: Gospel Music Broadcasting and the Making of Evangelical Culture. Ward joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen on Quick to Listen to discuss Limbaugh’s impact on Christian radio, how Christian radio differs from Christian TV, and how the medium does or not does not make the message What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Yvonne Su and Bunmi Ishola Christianity Today’s most recent article on mixed-gender friendships Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Last week, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries released a 12-page report about its founder and namesake. It confirmed “abuse by Zacharias at day spas he owned in Atlanta and uncovers five additional victims in the US, as well as evidence of sexual abuse in Thailand, India, and Malaysia.” From CT’s reporting: Even a limited review of Zacharias’s old devices revealed contacts for more than 200 massage therapists in the US and Asia and hundreds of images of young women, including some that showed the women naked. Zacharias solicited and received photos until a few months before his death in May 2020 at age 74. Zacharias used tens of thousands of dollars of ministry funds dedicated to a “humanitarian effort” to pay four massage therapists, providing them housing, schooling, and monthly support for extended periods of time, according to investigators. One woman told the investigators that “after he arranged for the ministry to provide her with financial support, he required sex from her.” She called it rape. She said Zacharias “made her pray with him to thank God for the ‘opportunity’ they both received” and, as with other victims, “called her his ‘reward’ for living a life of service to God,” the report says. Zacharias warned the woman—a fellow believer—if she ever spoke out against him, she would be responsible for millions of souls lost when his reputation was damaged. As once again, we’ve learned the flagrantly sinful double life of a prominent Christian leader, we wanted to discuss how to discuss it in light of what we believe about grace, mercy, and sin. These principles, of course, are the bedrock of our Christian faith, but are especially ones we grapple with in light of Ash Wednesday.  Covenant College professor of theological studies Kelly Kapic joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss if all our sins are equally wicked to God, what it means to extend grace to a person you never met personally, and what it means to hold people accountable for their sins, especially after they’ve died. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Yvonne Su and Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. One third of San Francisco public schools will be renamed in the coming months following a decision by the city’s school board to remove the names of individuals who had owned slaves, actively participated in segregation, or were colonizers. The decision, which includes 44 school sites, attracted national attention as it includes schools named for Thomas Jefferson Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt.The decision has drawn scorn from conservatives who see the decision as yet another example of liberal hysteria but also from other liberals. Last week, The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner grilled Gabriela López, the head of San Francisco Board of Education who refuted some of the historical claims that had been made by the committee which had investigated the named figures. (Read the interview.) But the government isn’t the only actor wrestling over questions of renaming institutions. As Ravi Zacharias’s misdeeds have been exposed in recent months, the ministry named after him has wrestled with whether or not it should continue to bear his name.Of course, renaming places, and people, for that matter is not new. Throughout the Old Testament, God renames places and people. But why? That’s what we wanted to get into on the podcast this week. Carmen Joy Imes is associate professor of Old Testament and program coordinator of Bible and theology at Prairie College in Three Hills, Alberta and the of author of Bearing God’s Name: Why Sinai Still Matters and its forthcoming sequel, Being God’s Image: Why Creation Still Matters. She also joined Quick to Listen in 2020. (Listen to “When Those in Power Get Sick.”) Imes joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss Old Testament precedent for renaming people v. places, what it means for humans to have the ability to name, and whether or not churches should bear people’s names. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Carmen Joy Imes Read Imes’ blog: Chastened Institutions Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Yvonne Su and Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This special episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you by CT Creative Studio in partnership with PBS. It’s the first Black History Month since racial unrest erupted in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Many Americans are reckoning with systemic racism in politics and culture in ways they haven’t in the past. But, just as it does today, the black church has born witness to justice and righteousness for centuries.On this special bonus episode of Quick to Listen sponsored by PBS, Christianity Today Editor-in-Chief Daniel Harrell facilitates a discussion on the black church as a spiritual, political, social, and cultural movement of the Spirit. He welcomes Dr. Vincent Bacote, Associate Professor of Theology and Director of Center for Applied Christian Ethics at Wheaton College; Dr. Dennis R. Edwards, pastor, church planter, and Associate Professor of New Testament at North Park University in Chicago; and Dr. Jamal Williams, lead pastor of Sojourn Church Midtown in Louisville, Kentucky.What does it mean to refer to the “black church” when there are many distinctions that separate congregations, ranging from theological nuances to responses to social ills? What are the challenges of shepherding people in addressing racism when those people represent a range of thoughts, experiences, and skin colors?Tune in to hear faithful pastors and scholars answer these questions, share their experiences of the black church, and testify to the glorious hope of the gospel. The Black Church: This Is Our Story; This Is Our Song premieres February 16 and 17 on PBS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. The last time you heard about GameStop was when you went to the mall to buy video games as a teenager or for your ex-teenager who now has their own teenager. But last week, the brick-and-mortar gaming company was in the news as GameStop prices went thru the roof. This Monday they opened at $315. For reference, as recently as Jan 12, the stock was $19.95. Why? In recent months, members of the Reddit community, Wall Street Bets, have begun encouraging each other to buy up stock of the company, efforts which began in earnest after several hedge funds announced that they would be betting against the antiquated electronics franchise. One of the first storylines to emerge from this was one that pitted the upstart nerds against the greedy hedge funds. But...like most things, the reality is a bit more complicated .Wheaton College assistant professor of economics Enoch Hill joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to break down the craziness on Wall Street and offer some deeper takeaways for those trying to navigate their market and their faith in 2021. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Yvonne Su and Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. “Was the US never really a “Christian country,” or was US Christianity corrupted by politics?”That’s the question that Kylie Beach, a writer for the Australian-based Eternity News asked several days after the capitol insurrection and several days before last week’s presidential inauguration. She continued: Did the US only ever appear to be more Christian than other countries, or was its Christianity corrupted by politics? To put it frankly, are the people who declare themselves to be Christians in the US really just ‘cultural Christians’ – people who are ethnically descended from nations where Christianity was the primary religion? Or people who have taken on the outward form of their grandparent’s faith? Have they ever actually had a moment of conversion where they have decided to accept Christ as their Lord and Saviour? Do they read their Bibles to try to learn what God is like? Do they pray and listen for his direction? Beach isn’t the only Christian from around the world asking what to make of US evangelicals after Trump. At the UK’s Evangelical Alliance CEO Gavin Calver wrote a column for the Times with the headline, "Let us redefine evangelism after the Trump presidency." He wrote that the word evangelical has become politicized and toxic even in the UK because of Trump politics. René Breuel is the pastor of Hopera, an evangelical church in Rome and has served as a student leader in International Fellowship of Evangelical Students movements in Brazil, Germany, Canada, and Italy. He is also the author of The Paradox of Happiness. Breuel joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss how non-US evangelicals saw American evangelicals before Trump, what has changed over the past four years, and what American evangelicals who want to regain this trust must do moving forward. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: René Breuel Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Yvonne Su and Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. For years, one of the primary ways that people experienced Donald Trump was through his tweets. All of that changed on January 8, when, in the aftermath of the capitol insurrection, Twitter banned @realDonaldTrump. “Due to the ongoing tensions in the United States, and an uptick in the global conversation in regards to the people who violently stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, these two tweets must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behavior from this account in recent weeks,” read the statement, which included the text of the tweets. “After assessing the language in these Tweets against our Glorification of Violence policy, we have determined that these Tweets are in violation of the Glorification of Violence Policy and the user @realDonaldTrump should be immediately permanently suspended from the service.” Twitter was not the only social media service to crack down on Trump. Snapchat banned him permanently. Facebook banned Trump's account through the remainder of his term and suggested it could ban "indefinitely." Last week, YouTube suspended Trump for a week because they said he violated a violence policy. This flurry of tech moves has raised questions about free speech and left some Christians wondering how well their First Amendment rights will be protected in the midst of this. John Inazu is a professor of law and religion at the Washington University Law School. He is the author of Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving through Deep Difference and more recently, with Tim Keller, Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference. Inazu joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss the complexity of defining “free speech,” what people misunderstand about the First Amendment, and the blind spots that Christians can have when advocating for free speech. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: John Inazu Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Yvonne Su and Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. As crowds lined up in front of the Capitol last week, Christian imagery was on display amidst the Trump/Pence 2020 and confederate flags, QAnon memorabilia, and viking helmets. People held crosses, “Jesus Saves” signs and “Jesus 2020.” As protesters crowded onto the Capitol steps, across the street, someone blew a shofar while a woman sang “Peace in the name of Jesus. The blood of Jesus covering this place." In the aftermath of the Capitol attack, many saw a clear connection between the violence and Christian nationalism. As Tish Harrison Warren wrote for CT: The responsibility of yesterday’s violence must be in part laid at the feet of those evangelical leaders who ushered in and applauded Trump’s presidency. It can also sadly be laid at the feet of the white American church more broadly. Paul D. Miller is professor of the practice of international affairs at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He is also a research fellow with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He recently released Just War and Ordered Liberty and is currently finalizing a book tentatively titled Christian Nationalism in the Age of Trump for InterVarsity Press. Miller joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to define Christian nationalism, shed light on its rise in the white evangelical world, and offer advice to church leaders trying to deradicalize members of their own community. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Paul D. Miller Some of Whitehead and Perry’s Christian nationalism numbers Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Yvonne Su Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This podcast was originally released on September 9, 2020. Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. A conspiracy theory that holds that many in the elite are part of a sex trafficking cabal, QAnon’s supporters has increasingly moved into the mainstream. Many also attend evangelical churches. It’s appeal in our community is World magazine’s cover story for this week and also was the subject of recent longform article for MIT Technology Review.  But the phenomena is not limited to the United States, as Mark Sayers, the senior leader of Red Church in Melbourne, Australia, witnessed when he recently saw followers in shirts with symbols tied to the movement in his city.  “It's really interesting, cause as I looked at it, I began to see it less as a conspiracy—I mean, there are elements of conspiracy theory—but it's really a new religious movement,”said Sayers, who is also the author of Reappearing Church: The Hope for Renewal in the Rise of Our Post-Christian Culture. “And I wonder if it's the first great internet religion. It’s not the only one out there, there are other online internet religions growing and other conspiracy theories flying around—this is just one of them. But I think there is some concern in it.” Sayers joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen in a discussion for listeners who are trying to reach family members or other loved ones who have accepted these beliefs. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Mark Sayers Visit our guest’s website: Mark Sayers Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last week, Argentina became the first Latin America country to legalize abortion. The Senate approved the bill two years after it rejected a similar effort two years ago. The bill allows women to legally end pregnancies for any reason up to 14 weeks. After that, it makes exceptions for rape and the health of the women. It also makes abortions free in public hospitals. Also home of the first Latin American pope, Argentina’s Catholic population has declined in recent years according to a study from the National Scientific and Technical Research Council. In 2019, around 63 percent of the population identified as Catholic, a 13 percent point drop since 2008. The two growing religious groups: evangelicals, who now make up 15 percent of the population, and the nones, or those who don’t identify with any faith, who are now at 19 percent. Josue Fernandez is based in Argentina and serves as the regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean at Overseas Council, a ministry of United World Mission that works to train and educate church leaders around the world by partnering with local seminaries. He has helped pastor Christian and Missionary Alliance congregations in Buenos Aires and Queens. He is also the Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean for GATE, a ministry which supports seminary faculty members. Fernandez joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss the religious future of Argentina, the type of influence the church has on the region at large, and the events that have led to the dramatic decline of the Catholic Church. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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As we close 2020, more than 81 million people total have tested positive for COVID-19. Nearly 1.8 million people have died of it. The virus has had significant economic effects and cost many their livelihoods. Prolonged distance from others, of course, has also triggered an increase in depression and other mental health issues. And the pandemic has revealed increasing divisions over masks, meeting in person, and what constitutes an essential business or service. Of course, the pandemic was not the only thing that provoked anxiety in many this year. America will get a new president in January, but current president Donald Trump has refused to concede and made false statements about voting fraud for weeks. In May, a police officer killed Minneapolis’ George Floyd weeks after officers shot Breonna Taylor in her home, actions which sparked demonstrations across the country, protesters fed up with police violence against black Americans. Protests lasted for weeks and were especially heated where protesters, counterprotesters, and outside agitators converged. Many cities suffered looting and some burned buildings.  In a year with so much trauma, we wanted to spend some time talking about how we should start to process and make sense of the year. What should we remember? How should we remember it? And what should we forget? Sheila Wise Rowe is a writer, counselor, speaker, and spiritual director, and most recently the author of Healing Racial Trauma: The Road to Resilience for which she won a 2021 Christianity Today Book of the Year Award. She joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editor in chief Daniel Harrell to discuss how our bodies experienced the trauma of the year, what parts of it we should remember, and what Christians might choose to set as a 2021 New Year’s resolution.  What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Sheila Wise Rowe Visit her website Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Yvonne Su Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Believe it or not, Christmas is this week. Yup, even in a year that felt like it was always winter and that there could not ever be Christmas. And we need a little Christmas, right this very minute. Candles in the window, Quick to Listen scripts in the spinnet. This week on the show, we are talking to Tim Larsen, the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Christmas, a 656-page book all about the world’s biggest holiday. The book is divided into eight sections: history, theology, worshipping communities, the nativity scene, traditions, arts, around the world, and state and society. Of course, we won’t get into all of the 45 articles in here today but we are gonna do some nerding out about this holiday. Merry Christmas everyone! Larsen is a professor of theology at Wheaton College and was recently awarded the degree of Doctor of Divinity in historical theology from the University of Edinburgh. He was the only author to win the Books & Culture book of the year twice. Larsen joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss why Christians used to love Santa, how KFC became a Japanese Christmas tradition, and how the holiday went from a day of rowdiness to one spent with friends and family. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Convince your library to buy The Oxford Handbook of Christmas Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Yvonne Su Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Last week the Trump administration carried out its 9th and 10th federal execution of 2020. On Wednesday night, the state executed a 40-year-old man, Brandon Bernard. According to the AP, “when Bernard was 18 he and four other teenagers abducted and robbed Todd and Stacie Bagley on their way from a Sunday service in Killeen, Texas, during which Bernard doused their car with lighter fluid and set it on fire with their bodies in the back trunk.” Bernard’s death comes several months after the Justice Department surfaced a proposal to “reintroduce firing squads and electrocutions for federal executions, giving the government more options for administering capital punishment as drugs used in lethal injections become unavailable.” Last Friday, the government executed Alfred Bourgeois, who has an intellectual disability, whose should have meant he could not have been up for the death penalty. But Bourgeois’s trial lawyers did not present evidence of his intellectual disability to the jury. He was the 17th person executed in the united states this year, and the country’s last scheduled execution for 2020. This week on Quick to Listen, we wanted to discuss how to wrestle with the death penalty, accountability, justice, and forgiveness from someone who has straddled many sides of this situation.  Jeanne Bishop, a felony trial attorney in the Office of the Cook County Public Defender in Chicago. She is the author of Change of Heart: Justice, Mercy, and Making Peace with My Sister’s Killer and Grace From the Rubble: Two Fathers’ Road to Reconciliation After the Oklahoma City Bombing. Bishop joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss how her work and sister’s murder have impacted how she views the death penalty, what accountability and justice look like outside of the death penalty, and how to pray for those in the criminal justice system during the pandemic.  What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Jeanne Bishop Visit Jeanne Bishop’s website Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Yvonne Su Read Morgan’s interview with Jeanne: Forgiving Her Sister's Murderer, Face to Face Read Ted’s piece about Pullman, Disney World, and churches Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Several weeks ago, Netflix dropped the latest season of its highly acclaimed show The Crown. The fourth season tells the story of the British monarchy in the '80s and '90s and depicts the Queen’s relationship with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and features Princess Diana. With so many of the characters depicted still alive and in recent-ish memory for a number of viewers, the show has provoked controversy like never before. While The Crown always creatively depicted the past, this year, this season has drawn criticism from those who claim the show is misleading viewers about the true history of the monarchy. Netflix even recently put out a statement that said it would not issue a disclaimer reminding viewers that the drama was fictional. “We have always presented The Crown as a drama—and we have every confidence our members understand it’s a work of fiction that’s broadly based on historical events. As a result we have no plans, and see no need, to add a disclaimer.” This week on Quick to Listen, we thought we would tackle some of the issues stirred up by this season of the Crown by getting a sense of how they’ve been wrestled with by the creator of The Chosen, a series portraying the life of Jesus through the stories of his followers.  Dallas Jenkins is the showrunner of the series The Chosen, which has broken records as the largest crowdfunded media project ever, and has been watched so far by more than 50 million people in 180 countries, and translated into more than 50 languages. Jenkins joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss how the show has wrestled with historical accuracy, the challenge of adding and changing characters, and how watching prestige TV affected his approach to making the show. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Watch The Chosen Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Yvonne Su Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. This Sunday kicked off the beginning of Advent. While the season is generally seen as a time of preparing to celebrate Christ’s birth on Christmas, the focus historically was a time to focus on Jesus’ Second Coming.  The doctrine of Jesus’ Second Coming has traditionally been a major focus of Christian theology: it has been a driving force for missions, it was a source of hope for suffering Christians, it helped to frame Christian worship.  American evangelicals in particular have been shaped by discussion of Jesus’ return—apocalyptic expectation helped to shape the early fundamentalist movement more than 100 years ago. Baby Boomer evangelicalism has been especially focused on the End Times, from Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth of the 70’s to the Left Behind novels of the 90’s. But it seems increasingly rare to us to hear about the Second Coming these days. This week on Quick to Listen, we wanted to talk about why that might be and why a strong understanding of the Second Coming can serve us well as we navigate the pandemic and other crises. Vince Bacote is associate professor of theology and director of the Center for Applied Christian Ethics at Wheaton College. He has been serving as a theology adviser for Christianity Today over the last year and is a contributor to our Advent devotional, “Living Hope,” which you can find on our website this week.  Bacote joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss why Christians aren’t talking about the Second Coming as much these days, how these conversations can serve us during the pandemic, and what responsibly talking about the End Times looks like.  What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow Vince Bacote on Twitter Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. At the beginning of this month, Hillsong NYC pastor Carl Lentz was fired. A day after the news went public, he posted a picture of his family on Instagram admitting he was unfaithful in his marriage. Both before and after the news, Lentz made headlines across Christian and secular media for his popularity and successful ministry—as well as the “hipster” pastor look he popularized. When Lentz co-founded Hillsong NYC with Joel Houston in 2010, the church drew lines around the block and caught the eye of A-list celebrities, none more famous than Justin Bieber. Lentz, who became famous for his wire-rimmed glasses, plunging V-necks, and designer sneakers, himself became subject of a number of profiles, including this 2015 GQ feature from Taffy Brodesser-Akner: “The music! The lights! The crowds!” begins an incredulous woman narrating a CNN segment on Hillsong NYC . “It looks like a rock concert.” The chyron reads “Hipster preacher smashes stereotypes.” They call Pastor Carl a hipster. Carl says he doesn’t know what that means, and he wears a motorcycle jacket when he says this.Pastor Joel is unwilling to acknowledge that there’s something going on here. Yes, he tells me, sure, he likes clothes. But that’s the end of it. I should ask Pastor Carl about the clothes, he tells me. What Pastor Carl does, he says—that’s intentional, and then he laughs. This week on Quick to Listen, we wanted to discuss the attention around a new generation of fashion-forward pastors. What does it reveal about ministry? But what does our fascination with this aesthetic reveal more broadly about the American and Western church? Anthropologist Katherine Ajibade, formerly a researcher with the British think tank Theos, joins CT’s Morgan Lee and Kate Shellnutt. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Kate Shellnutt Follow Katherine Ajibade on Twitter Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. We’re right on the cusp of the holiday season. Except this year it doesn’t feel much like it. Each day this month, thousands of American—record numbers—have tested positive for COVID-19. Even as several vaccines are now on the horizon, many public health authorities have asked Americans to not reunite with extended family over Thanksgiving, requests that will no doubt continue during the Christmas season.  Millions of people have already spent hours more this year inside, apart from their loved ones, houses of worship, and beloved activities. While the summer offered many a respite from their homes, the arrival of cold weather will likely keep people there. This bleakness, of course, comes on the heels of a year of postponed weddings, never organized baby showers, and drive-by birthday parties. And, of course, one of the year’s most agonizing elements has been the disparity with which community and individuals have adopted and practiced social distancing and mask-wearing. These relationship tensions have had both personal and societal polarizing effect.  This week on Quick to Listen, we discussed the reality between the joyous expectations of the holidays—and the darkness we’re all feeling this year with Chris Hall, the president of Renovare, the spiritual formation organization started by Richard Foster. Hall is also associate editor of the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture and has written a great four volume series of books on what we can learn from the early church, and was one of CT’s theology editors and advisers. He joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to talk about growing in your relationship with God and practicing spiritual disciplines during a pandemic.   What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Learn more about Renovaré Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. This week, Maryland megachurch pastor Harry Jackson passed away at age 65. Over the last four years, Jackson was a member of President Trump’s evangelical advisory board. That consulting team was a marked shift in the role that faith communities had played in the executive branch in recent decades. The focus in the Bush and Obama administrations, by contrast, had been on the ways that faith-based and community groups could work with the federal government on social problems, and on hiring officials who would work on international religious freedom. What role will religious leaders, religious groups, and religion policy play in a Biden administration? And what lessons might Biden take from his presidential predecessors on how church and state can work together, and how they should work separately? This week on Quick to Listen, we wanted to discuss the future of faith in the Biden administration. Stanley Carlson-Thies is the founder and senior director of the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance (IRFA), a division of the Center for Public Justice. He served with the White House Office of Faith-Based & Community Initiatives from its inception in February 2001 until mid-May 2002, and later served on a task force of President Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. He joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen on Quick to Listen. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow Stanley Carlson-Thies’ work: Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance Read the Brookings Institute report: A Time to Heal Read more about Fairness for All and the Equality Act Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hi Quick to Listen listeners. We recorded this episode in 2018 but given the headlines from this week's election, we thought you mind find it constructive and helpful so we decided to drop it in our feed again. As always, send us your thoughts and questions at podcasts@christianitytoday.com or on Twitter at @CTPodcasts. Elections often call attention to white evangelicals whose votes and voices play a significant role in national elections. But their attitudes and values don’t necessarily represent those of evangelicals from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Case in point: Latino evangelicals. According to data from the Billy Graham Center Institute at Wheaton College and LifeWay Research, 41 percent of Hispanics with evangelical beliefs voted for Trump in 2016. What were the issues that most influenced their vote?According to the same survey, 19 percent said improving the economy, 14 percent said helping those in need, and 14 percent said a candidate’s position on immigration.“ Most Latinos will tend to be socially conservative on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage but will tend to be social liberals on issues like education and immigration, so we’ve tended to be divided on how we spread the vote,” said Juan Martínez, who currently serves as professor of Hispanic studies and pastoral leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary. “This isn’t new; it just stands out more because we’re a larger percentage of the voting block. Those of us who have voted have struggled with this for years because the Democrat/Republican way that this is broken out doesn’t fit us well.” Martínez joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the history of Latino evangelicals and what unifies and divides the community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. This week on Quick to Listen, we wanted to discuss the election with those who have been following this race closely. On this episode, senior news editor Kate Shellnutt, print news editor Daniel Silliman, and researcher Ryan Burge join global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guests on Twitter: Kate Shellnutt, Daniel Silliman, and Ryan Burge Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Halloween has always been a tricky day for conservative Protestants. It has long been seen as a celebration of the dark—joking about bloody gore, the living dead. But this year, death and darkness doesn’t seem quite so amusing. October 31 comes as more than 1.1 million people around the world have died of COVID-19. Nearly 20 percent of those deaths have occurred in the US, a country where COVID-19 cases are once again on the rise. As parents are making last minute decisions about what to do about trick or treating, as churches cancel their harvest festivals and trunk or treat events, and parties are moved to zoom and even schools forego their annual costume parades, we wondered: Is this weird Halloween in a very weird year the opportunity for better Christian thinking and discipleship? Can rethinking this season where we oddly engage death and darkness help us deal with death and darkness the rest of this covid season, and the rest of our lives? If so, where do we look? Back to Halloween’s connections to All Saint’s Day? Or to other ways that the church has formed its spiritual disciplines around death? CT columnist, a priest in the Anglican Church in North America, and author of the forthcoming book, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work, or Watch, or Weep, Tish Harrison Warren joined global media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss what our celebrations of Halloween say about our beliefs about death, how we might confront our own darkness, and how prayer provides a place for us to wrestle with the night. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Tish Harrison Warren Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. This fall, violence broke out again between Armenia and Azerbaijan over a contested region in Azerbaijan known as Nagorno-Karabakh. Home of 170,000 people, the majority of its inhabitants are ethnic Armenian and the area itself has been governed by ethnic Armenians since 1994. The countries’ close allegiances with other countries had worried many that the fighting and civilian deaths might spiral into a regional conflict. Armenia, for instance, has close ties to Russia and, to a lesser extent, Iran. Azerbaijan has the strong support of Turkey and some have reported that Syrian militants are also fighting alongside the Azeri. Another complicating level is religion. More than 95 percent of Azerbaijan’s 10 million people identify as Muslim, mostly Shiite. More than 90 percent of Armenia’s three million people identify as Christian, specifically Armenian Apostolic. Armenia also boasts the oldest state church, all the way back to the beginning of the fourth century A.D. This week on Quick to Listen we talked to Felix Corley about the country’s Christian heritage and the extent to which it is playing a role in the current conflict. Corley is editor of Forum 18 News Service, which covers religious freedom issues in the former Soviet Union. He has written extensively on the Armenian Apostolic church in the Soviet period. Corley joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss how Christianity first arrived in Armenia, the enduring trauma of the genocide, and how the Apostolic Church engages and interacts with other Christians in the country.W hat is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Learn more about Forum 18 Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. This week, the Senate is holding confirmation hearings for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court. After Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg died last month, with less than two months before Election Day, Trump nominated Coney Barrett to replace her on the bench.The proceedings have been contentious. After Antonin Scalia died in 2015, Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell refused to hold a vote or hold confirmation hearings after President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the seat more than a year before the election. Their decision to move forward with this nomination has provoked charges of hypocrisy. In addition, Coney Barrett’s relationship with her Catholic-Charismatic community, People of Praise, has drawn scrutiny as critics have asked what type of authority this group might have over her judicial decisions. Given Coney Barrett’s rise, this week on Quick to Listen, we wanted to talk about the state of Christian legal world with Kim Colby, who has worked for Christian Legal Society’s Center for Law and Religious Freedom since graduating from Harvard Law School in 1981. Colby has represented religious groups in several appellate cases, including two cases heard by the United States Supreme Court. She has filed numerous amicus briefs in federal and state courts. She was also involved in the congressional passage of the Equal Access Act in 1984. Colby joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss what she makes of Coney Barrett’s participation in her intentional Christian community, what it’s like being a woman in the Christian legal community, and what unites and divides Catholics and Protestants together in this world. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Learn more about the Christian Legal Society Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Last week, President Trump announced that he and his wife Melania had tested positive for COVID-19. Since then, a number of those in his administration and his campaign have also tested positive. In the wake of this diagnoses, the US media has fixated on the political ramifications of these diagnoses. But how might the stories of biblical rulers who suffer disease and sickness speak to the moment? Carmen Joy Imes is associate professor of Old Testament and program coordinator of Bible and theology at Prairie College in Three Hills, Alberta and the of author of Bearing God’s Name: Why Sinai Still Matters and its forthcoming sequel, Being God’s Image: Why Creation Still Matters.  Imes joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss if scripture treats the illnesses of leaders differently than general illnesses, the difference in the Old Testament between simple illness and illness as judgment, and whether or not it’s possible to link sin and sickness. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Carmen Joy Imes Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. This week, Christianity Today published an in-depth report on allegations of sexual misconduct by popular apologist Ravi Zacharias:  "Three women who worked at the businesses, located in a strip mall in the Atlanta suburbs, told Christianity Today that Ravi Zacharias touched them inappropriately, exposed himself, and masturbated during regular treatments over a period of about five years. His business partner said he regrets not stopping Zacharias and sent an apology text to one of the victims this month. "RZIM denies the claims, saying in a statement to CT that the charges of sexual misconduct “do not in any way comport with the man we knew for decades.” The organization has hired a law firm “with experience investigating such matters” to look into the allegations, which date back at least 10 years. RZIM declined to answer any further questions about the inquiry." This week on Quick to Listen, we discuss this story with Daniel Silliman, the journalist who wrote it. He joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss how he went about reporting this story, what makes this story unique from other stories of other fallen Christian leaders, and why CT reports bad news on Christian leaders, even after they have passed away.  What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Why we report bad news about leaders: A note from the editors on the Ravi Zacharias investigation Follow our guest on Twitter: Daniel Silliman Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. He describes himself in his Instagram bio as a Jesus Follower, Missionary, Artist, Author, Humanitarian, Activist. But right now, Sean Feucht may be best known as a volunteer Bethel worship leader who has spent his summer leading around two dozen outdoor worship concerts. Feucht’s events are “a mix of Christian concert, healing service, guerrilla street theater and spectator mosh pit,” Religion News Service recently reported. They can also turn political. After the city of Seattle recently refused to give Feucht and his worship team permission to host a concert in one of his parks, likely because concerns of masking and social distancing, they held their show on a nearby street. As the concert began, he informed the audience. “Politicians can write press releases, they can make up threats, they can shut down parks, they can put up fences. But they can’t stop the church of Christ from worshipping the one true God. We are here as citizens of America and of the kingdom of God and we will not be silenced.” There’s something really powerful when people when people bring together music and mission, says Leah Payne, associate professor of theology at George Fox University and Portland Seminary.“I found this great quote a while back when I was researching temperance workers who were wanting to use hymns to their cause, and they said music was the key to doing that because they said it was a sentiment maker,” said Payne. “It was magical. It could create within people the emotional logic that they needed to overcome their objections to something. And I think that's something revivalists have been especially good at. They understand that music moves people—any and all kinds of music, harnessed in any particular direction.” Payne joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen and discuss the religious traditions that inspire Feucht’s ministry, if people should be surprised to see worship leaders voicing political beliefs, and why so many popular worship leaders are good at Instagram. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Learn more about our guest: Leah Payne Listen to our guest’s podcast: Weird Religion Check out Sean Feucht’s music on Spotify Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Unless you’ve actually been in an area where you can look out your window and see the view with your own eyes, by now you’ve caught images of an orange sky coming from West Coast. For the past week, hundreds of miles of California, Oregon, Washington, and neighboring states have been covered in smokey air as forest fires rage, driving thousands of people from their homes. More than a dozen people have died in these historically catastrophic fires. As climate change has increasingly worsened fire season, it’s changed how Paige Parry, associate professor of Biology at George Fox University, makes sense of these disasters.  “We know that humans are what’s contributing to the fires,” said Parry. “So in my head, that makes my response and the questions that I ask very different than maybe a disaster that's truly natural and not influenced at all by human action.” Parry, a quantitative forest ecologist, has spent most of her life and research in the West.  “Within this context of feeling like we have so little control over the situations that are unfolding here on the West Coast and feeling like we're just victims of these fires ravaging, there's a part of me that also recognizes that our collective actions and choices have in some ways likely contributed to the situation that we've found ourselves in, which I think leaves us to wrestle with it in a very different way,” she said.  Parry joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss why these fires have grown increasingly worse, what types of consequences the fires have even after they’ve been extinguished, and how a Christian response to fires may look different in the wake of climate change.  What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Learn more about our guest: Paige Parry Visit our guest’s website: The Parry Lab Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. A conspiracy theory that holds that many in the elite are part of a sex trafficking cabal, QAnon’s supporters has increasingly moved into the mainstream. Many also attend evangelical churches. It’s appeal in our community is World magazine’s cover story for this week and also was the subject of recent longform article for MIT Technology Review.  But the phenomena is not limited to the United States, as Mark Sayers, the senior leader of Red Church in Melbourne, Australia, witnessed when he recently saw followers in shirts with symbols tied to the movement in his city.  “It's really interesting, cause as I looked at it, I began to see it less as a conspiracy—I mean, there are elements of conspiracy theory—but it's really a new religious movement,”said Sayers, who is also the author of Reappearing Church: The Hope for Renewal in the Rise of Our Post-Christian Culture. “And I wonder if it's the first great internet religion. It’s not the only one out there, there are other online internet religions growing and other conspiracy theories flying around—this is just one of them. But I think there is some concern in it.” Sayers joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen in a discussion for listeners who are trying to reach family members or other loved ones who have accepted these beliefs. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Mark Sayers Visit our guest’s website: Mark Sayers Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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In the past week, a video has circulated on social media that appears to show Christian author Eric Metaxas punching a protester in the face following President Trump's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on the White House lawn.  This week, Metaxas addressed the incident to World Magazine.   “For context, just so you know, the guy came at me with his bike and was very menacing for a long time,” he said.  Commentary over Metaxas’ action took off during a week in which a 17-year-old vigilante shot and killed two protesters in Kenosha and a counter-protester was shot and killed in a Portland demonstration. This uptick in civilian violence, which has occurred at protests organized in the aftermath of police brutality, inspired writer Bonnie Kristian’s recent column for The Week, “You Know What Violence Is.”  “The basic, standard definition of violence, that you'll find across the board, has pretty consistent elements,” said Kristian, who is also a columnist for Christianity Today. “One is that it involves the use of physical force; so it can't be purely verbal. And then one is that there's an intent to inflict harm.” Kristian joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss whether silence is violence, if violence always begets violence, and why people often don’t want to own the actions of their side as violence.  What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Jerry Falwell Jr. resigned as president of Liberty University on Monday. The news came after Reuters reported that a friend and business partner of the couple had sex with Becki Falwell while Jerry Falwell Jr. watched. Falwell Jr. himself submitted his resignation only to reverse course twice. Falwell Jr. was already on an indefinite leave of absence after he posted a picture on Instagram of him posing with his arm around a woman at a party with their zippers down and midsections exposed. With one notable exception, Liberty’s board has staged largely silent in the wake of Falwell Jr.’s increasingly controversial public statements and financial dealings. For ministry boards which have run into moral or ethic issues with their CEOs, one common mistake is allowing the CEO to recommend too many board members, says Bob Andringa, the managing partner of the Andringa Group who specializes in governance and the relationship between boards and chief executives. “Who's a CEO going to recommend? They’re going to recommend friends,” said Andringa, who has written several books on board governance, including The Nonprofit Board Answer Book and Good Governance for Nonprofits. “And so when it comes down to crunch time, those friends have more loyalty to the CEO than they do to the mission of the whole organization.” Andringa joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss the blind spots of Christian boards, what encourages and discourages them in holding leaders accountable, and why more retired people should serve on boards. Take Quick to Listen’s survey! What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Belarus' President Alexander Lukashenko has been in office for 26 years. After last week’s elections, he says he’s won yet another term. But Belarusians are saying enough is enough, with thousands of them taking to the streets in protest and demanding new elections. Lukashenko has shot down this request thus far. The majority of Belarusians identify as Christian. Of the country’s roughly 10 million, 73 percent are Orthodox and 12 percent Catholic, according to Pew Research Center data. Though the Protestant community is tiny, it has not been silent. Last week, the Union of Evangelical Christian Baptists in Belarus, the United Church of Christians of Evangelical Faith in Belarus, and the Religious Association of Full Gospel Communities in Belarus released a joint statement asking for prayer.  Protests in 2010 played a key role in changing Protestants’ minds on Lukashenko and the government, says Geraldine Fagan, the editor of the East-West Church Report and author of Believing in Russia – Religious Policy after Communism.  “I think particularly since then, there's been an increasingly strong pro-democracy movement within the church,” said Fagan. “And that has interacted with the other pro-democracy movements and has just gradually built momentum over the years. I think this is just the dam bursting basically. People just are not prepared to tolerate the restrictions that are actually impinging upon their consciences essentially.” Fagan joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss the arrival of Protestant Christianity in Belarus, what religious freedom looks like in the former Soviet country, and what the global church can learn from Belarusian Christians.  Take Quick to Listen’s survey! What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Last week, a Houston Chronicle reporter tweeted an image from Jerry Falwell Jr.’s instagram. The image showed the Liberty University president posing with his arm around a woman at a party with their zippers down and midsections exposed. By Friday, Falwell Jr. agreed to take an immediate and indefinite leave of absence from Liberty University, which he has led since 2007 as president and chancellor. As CT’s reporting noted: During his tenure—succeeding his father and the school’s founder, Jerry Falwell Sr.—the younger Falwell has expanded Liberty into one of the biggest Christian colleges in the world, now reporting an enrollment of over 120,000 students. But his leadership has also drawn controversy, including around his politics—such as his friendship with President Donald Trump—and personal life—like photos of him and his family at a Miami nightclub.In June, Falwell apologized for a tweet that included an image of the yearbook photo from Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s blackface scandal. Dozens of black alumni said he should “withdraw the racist tweet” and resign to focus on politics. This week on Quick to Listen, we wanted to discuss how Liberty University and its president fit in the larger landscape of Christian higher ed. Bill Ringenberg is faculty emeritus at Taylor University, where he was a longtime history professor and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, and the author of The Christian College: A History of Protestant Higher Education in America and The Christian College and Academic Freedom. He joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss where Liberty is positioned the Christian higher ed world, how athletics make a difference in how the school sees itself, and why it took a photo on Instagram for Liberty’s board to react to Jerry Falwell Jr. Take Quick to Listen’s survey! What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. 2020 has been a year unlike any other for Christian summer camps. Here’s how CT captured the situation in a recent report: Like most businesses and ministries across the country, Christian camps felt the economic halt right away. Church retreats and events were called off in March, April, and May due to bans on mass gatherings across the states. Before long, camps were forced to grapple with the unimaginable: no summer camp.By May’s end, more than 100 Christian camps had announced cancellations. Most of the rest made dramatic changes to summer programming. Summer camp can represent half of a camp’s annual revenue or more, so skipping it for a year comes as a massive financial blow. Many Christian camps did cancel their summers. Some canceled and then reversed course. Some held programming all summer.  This has been a very difficult summer. We've got camps that have been open continuously, even through WWI and WWII, closed down for the first time this summer,” said Jacob Sorenson, the director of Sacred Playgrounds, a ministry offering research and training to camps and congregations. “It's been a very difficult time for the industry as a whole, including secular camps.” One added challenge for Christian summer camps has been politics.  “Christian camps are again caught in this political environment where the ones that have a constituency that tends to be conservative have been under a lot of pressure to open up,” said Sorenson, who researches camping ministry and who contributed to the previously mentioned CT article. “While the ones that have a constituency that tends to be more progressive or Democratic-leaning have been under pressure to close down. And it’s made it very difficult for camp directors to make a good decision for the health of their camp communities.” Sorenson joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss the financial footprint of summer camp, what to know about how long a “camp high” really lasts, how many camps are using technology in ways never seen before, and who summer camps serve well and who they leave out.  Take Quick to Listen’s survey! What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Last week, John MacArthur announced that his megachurch would hold in-person, indoor services, despite California’s recent COVID-19 restrictions banning in-person meetings. In a statement explaining the rationale for the church’s actions in the midst of a pandemic, the pastor wrote:  Christ is Lord of all. He is the one true head of the church He is also King of kings—sovereign over every earthly authority. Grace Community Church has always stood immovably on those biblical principles. As His people, we are subject to His will and commands as revealed in Scripture. Therefore we cannot and will not acquiesce to a government-imposed moratorium on our weekly congregational worship or other regular corporate gatherings. Compliance would be disobedience to our Lord’s clear commands. What exactly should Christians make of MacArthur’s decision? One way to evaluate it is understanding whether it constitutes conscientious objection, civil disobedience, or something else, says Daniel K. Williams, professor of history at the University of West Georgia. From a historical perspective, “true civil disobedience, at least in its classic form, has been public. It's been an active protest. It has been accompanied by the willingness to accept the consequences,” said Williams. “And that last part is one that I'm not sure if that's always consistently followed.” Williams joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss what separates civil disobedience from merely breaking the law, how evangelicals have changed their mind on the issue in the past 50 years, and the role of empathy in shifting people’s attitudes and beliefs. Take Quick to Listen’s survey! What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola This podcast mentions Quick to Listen episodes 219, 216, and 215. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Despite the fact that the widely esteemed theologian J. I. Packer never lived in the United States, the theologian greatly influenced American evangelicals. One key way this transpired occurred through Packer’s longstanding relationship with Christianity Today. Packer’s first piece—a lengthy article on the opportunity and challenges for evangelicalism—was published in 1958. After the publication of his best-known work, Knowing God, he became contributing editor at Christianity Today in 1983 and then senior editor in 1985. He continued to serve the magazine in similar roles for the next three decades. In 1992, he wrote about how he envisaged his relationship with the publication: One role of CT, which is a features-news-and-thought journal anchored in the historic faith, is to keep you posted, one way and another, on the theological front. I suppose I should see myself as a kind of point man for this purpose. But most of all, I want to be a plumber and sewage man, as I said when I started, and most of all, I want CT always to be showing how head and heart should be joining in mature discipleship today. Head-without-heart journals and heart-without-head journals make for misshapen and underdeveloped Christians. It is important that we should find and follow the better way. Timothy George, distinguished professor of divinity at Beeson Divinity School, was a contemporary of Packer’s at CT.  “I would say his role at CT was a mentor to the whole enterprise, especially to all the editors,” said George. “For me and others that worked with him constantly in those days, we respected him and looked to him as someone who was a pioneer in the very thing that we were giving our lives to.” George joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss Packer’s CT legacy, the controversy he sparked over his convictions of the Bible’s inerrancy, and who is following in his footsteps today.  Take Quick to Listen’s survey! Read our JI Packer coverage What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. As Quick to Listen listeners are probably well aware, Christians rarely agree on everything. Take an issue like communion. On the one hand, it would be hard to find a Christian who doesn’t believe participating in Communion is a key part of what it means to practice one’s faith. But for some Christians, this is the focal point of weekly gatherings. Others can go months without partaking. For some, using whatever food and drink is around the house counts as the body and blood of Christ. Others need their priests to have blessed the physical products. And of course, COVID-19’s interruption of church services has introduced other questions about digital v. physical options.  So how can Christians better connect with each other and work each other across real theological diversity? One recent look at how the church might do this better is outlined in Gavin Ortlund’s new book Finding the Right Hills to Die On: The Case for Theological Triage which asks when doctrine should divide and when unity should prevail. Ortlund joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss whether evangelicals care too much or too little about theology, how debates about culture have changed how Christians relate to each other and how Christians can both stay true to their convictions and better serve the entirety of the body of Christ overall.  What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Gavin Ortlund Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Each Wednesday, Christianity Today's Quick to Listen drops a new episode that adds context and complexity to some of the hottest current events in the Christian world. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Take Quick to Listen’s survey! The protests that followed the killing of George Floyd in May started with a focus on police brutality. But six weeks later, a dominant theme is the removal of monuments, and memorials. Protesters have torn down or vandalized dozens of statues connected to the Confederacy and to other controversial historical figures like Christopher Columbus. But this isn’t the first time that statues have been torn down en mass amid widespread protests. After Constantine allowed Christianity in the Roman Empire, Christians tore down so many statues that in Athens they reportedly became known as “the people who move that which should not be moved.” Early church battled each other over religious iconography. Reformation Christians inspired another round of eager statue smashing and removal. “What's funny is when I was first getting acclimated to art as a Protestant, and learning that art history mattered, we were embarrassed about our iconoclastic heritage,” said Matthew Milliner, associate professor of art history at Wheaton College. “But what an honor to be known as ‘the people who moved that which should not be moved.’” Milliner joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss how much earlier Christian battles over statues echo today’s fights, what Christians have learned that might help us better understand the call to remove statues today, and whether we should even be creating memorials and monuments in the first place.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Take Quick to Listen’s survey! In 2014, Louisiana enacted a law requiring doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. Earlier this week, the Supreme Court struck down the law. Legislators said the requirement would improve the level of care that clinics provide for women. Abortion regulations in Louisiana and other conservative states have resulted in clinic closures and corresponded with falling abortion rates nationwide. Beyond the Supreme Court’s power, the federal government plays a key role in terms of shaping public opinion around abortion, says Alexandra DeSanctis, a staff writer for National Review and the host of the For Life podcast. “But I think in terms of what comes before courts, and what actually goes into effect, what actually matters for the everyday American in terms of how they think about abortion, is policy at the state level,” said DeSanctis. “And I think that even among pro-lifers, there are plenty of people who think you couldn't even really pass a ban on abortion through the U.S. Congress. ...So I do think if this is going to be a successful fight for pro-lifers, we have to think first and foremost of the micro-level, local and state policy first.” DeSanctis joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss what was surprising and unsurprising about the SCOTUS decision, what makes John Roberts tick, and if trying to get cases to the highest court in the land should be the goal for pro-lifers.  What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Alexandra Desanctis Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Take Quick to Listen’s listener survey! Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. The Navajo Nation continues to be hit hard by COVID-19. The community has reported nearly 7,000 cases and more than 330 deaths. Leaders have ordered businesses closed on weekends in a community that is spread across Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. The Navajo Nation’s preexisting conditions like poverty, limited running water, and close living situations make it extra vulnerable to coronavirus. The lockdowns have made it challenging for people to access the resources they need, says Donnie Begay, who along with his wife, Renee, directs the Nations Movement, a campus ministry that’s part of Cru. “On the Navajo Nation, there are only about a dozen food grocery stories that cover 27,000 square miles that is the Navajo reservation,” said Begay, who lives in Albuquerque. Many on the reservation live at least an hour away from the border of the reservations and these lockdowns cut them off from the businesses on the other side. “These lockdowns can be very cumbersome to people who need to drive an hour or more just to buy groceries or necessities and food during the pandemic,” said Begay. Begay joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss the community’s complex relationship with Christianity, why they’re uniquely vulnerable to COVID-19, and how Navajo millennials are making their faith their own. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Donnie Begay Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Last month, the Chinese government approved a plan that would give Mainland China the ability to crush any acts in Hong Kong that it deems a national security risk. Despite international outcry, the legislation will go into effect in September. In one of many responses by Hong Kongers, hundreds of theologians, pastors, and church leaders signed a statement accusing the draft decision of “further depriving Hong Kong of freedom and human rights.”The Christian leaders accused the Chinese government of destroying its promises and undercutting the city as an international financial center. At a time where, quote, “darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the peoples, we fearlessly and solemnly declare the following confession and promise to our society, including our full embrace of the Gospel of the Kingdom, our sincere repentance towards the Church’s shortcomings, our absolute refusal to authoritarian government, and our determination to walk together with Hong Kong society.” the statement said. As Hong Kong heads to the fall, the church could use prayers “for guidance and clarity for church leaders and Christians in Hong Kong and how we're going to walk this path. Because I honestly have no idea what's going to happen next,” said Ann Gillian Chu, who is completing her doctor of divinity at the University of St. Andrews in the Center for the Study of Religion and Politics and who has written widely on the theology of Hong Kong’s protest movements. “And I think there is also a general sense of weariness and dread on what’s going to happen,” she said. “And obviously, this is entirely out of our control. And so there's nothing else we can rely on, except for God.” Chu joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss the state of Christianity in Hong Kong, if the protests will unify or split the church, and if any prominent Hong Kong Christians desire a closer relationship between Hong Kong and China. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Gillian Chu Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. In recent weeks, American cities, suburbs, and small towns have seen an explosion of protests reacting to the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Even as many have commented on the racial diversity of the demonstrators, many of those organizing the marches are young African Americans activists. But while black pastors have organized several marches in major cities like Chicago and Washington DC, they have not been at the forefront of a movement that arguably began back in Ferguson in 2014.  “While you may have had many black pastors and clergy who may have shown up at events, and you may have had a lot of people from black churches who were at these marches and protests, from 2014 to the present, by and large, this has not been a theological movement,” said Watson Jones III, the senior pastor of Compassion Baptist Church in Chicago. “It hasn't been a movement that has started in the basements of churches, in prayer meetings, and altars that flooded out into the streets.” Despite this, Watson believes that some of what is fueling many of the young black activist leaders ties back to this institution.  “Much of how they do what they do are examples of things that early clergy and faithful Christians did in the ’50s, ’60s, and even ’70s, but there is an absence of clergy leading this movement,” he said. Watson joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss why the black church’s approach to activism has never been a monolith, how the community’s preaching is speaking to current events, and the extent to which the black church is struggling to keep young people engaged.  What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Watson Jones III Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. In the aftermath of the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, thousands of people across the country have taken to the streets to protest police brutality. Video of Floyd’s final moments as a police officer used his knee to pin his neck and his three colleagues looked on prompted a strong reaction from around this country. While perhaps more white evangelicals have spoken out against the police officers’ actions than after previous acts of police brutality made national news, some of the ways that they are framing their statements about law enforcement suggests they actually aren’t getting it, says Aaron L. Griffith, assistant professor of history at Sattler College in Boston. “I worry that many white evangelicals are talking about the problem of police brutality in terms of the exceptions, in terms of the bad apples. And then proposing things like more training or pushing more into the colorblind frame or even mobilizing language like ‘racial reconciliation,’ to say that black Americans have an opportunity to forgive and befriend the officers in their midst,” said Griffith, who is also the author of the forthcoming God’s Law and Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America.“That is very concerning to me because we've seen this before. We've seen this in moves toward community policing, which envisions the police as more closely connected, and perhaps even friendly, to the neighborhoods they serve,” he said. “But community policing projects are really much more about just changing perceptions of law enforcement, not the practices of how they operate. And really, making police more directly connected to communities, embedding them more closely in communities, often just exposes residents to more interactions and more risks.” Griffith joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss the origins of the police, how a desire to reach teenagers affected attitudes toward law enforcement, and if white evangelicals views are changing or not. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Aaron L. Griffith Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. California’s Department of Health’s reopening guidelines for houses of worship contain bitter news for those who love corporate worship.  “Strongly consider discontinuing singing, group recitation, and other practices and performances where there is increased likelihood for transmission from contaminated exhaled droplets,” the report warns. In another section it notes, “ Activities such as singing and group recitation negate the risk-reduction achieved through six feet of physical distancing.” Absorbing this is tough news for those who feel most connected to God and others through music. “There is something about articulating our emotional state and using music, using song, as a means of expressing ourselves before the Lord. And that's deep in the Christian tradition, from singing and praying the Psalms to the early hymns in the New Testament like in Luke's gospel and peppered through Paul's letters,” said Glenn Packiam, associate senior pastor at New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado. “There was also a reputation that early Christians get. In Pliny’s letter to the emperor, he says, “These strange Christians get together before sunrise and they sing these hymns to Christ as if to a God.” “There's something about song that helps us express more than just what the words of the song are saying,” continued Packiam, who is also the author of the forthcoming book, Worship and the World to Come Exploring Christian Hope in Contemporary Worship. Packiam joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss how his church has handled the pandemic from a worship perspective, what makes corporate singing special, and what it means that eschatology is missing from our worship music.  What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Visit our guest’s website: Glenn Packiam Read more about Packiam’s church: New Life After the Fall of Ted Haggard Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” That these 17 words were uttered by a woman named Julian of Norwich may be the only thing you know about this 14th-century English saint. Historians don’t necessarily know that much more. We’re not even sure her real name. So why do we remember her? In this episode of Prayer amid Pandemic, Amy Laura Hall, the author of Laughing at the Devil: Seeing the World with Julian of Norwich and a Christian ethics professor at Duke Divinity School, tell us why we know so little about Julian’s identity but why we still read her writings on the vision she received while sick today. Gideon Para-Mallam, the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students regional secretary for English and Portuguese-speaking Africa, offers this week’s prayer. Read Christianity Today’s latest coronavirus coverage What is Prayer amid Pandemic? Read more Rate Prayer amid Pandemic on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow the host on Twitter: Morgan Lee Music by Urban Nerd Beats, Prod. Riddiman, and Oliver Dúvel Prayer amid Pandemic is produced by Morgan Lee, Mike Cosper, and Erik Petrik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Plandemic? QAnon? Bill Gates creating the COVID-19?  As the novel coronavirus has traveled around the world, so too have conspiracy theories about the origins of the disease and the winners and losers that have emerged as result. In the past month, a video making claims that Gates and Anthony Fauci, who leads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, used COVID-19 to gain money and political power, went viral. At the same time as Plandemic, The Atlantic launched a new series examining conspiracy theories, including an in-depth look at the QAnon, a movement that makes bold claims about the global elite. The Bible has many things to say about conspiracy theories, specifically with regards for how Christians should determine what is real, says Dru Johnson, the director of the Center for Hebraic Thought and who wrote about conspiracy theories for CT in December. “The biblical diagnosis, the biblical impulse here, is not that you have to be afraid of someone lying to you. It's that somebody will always be interpreting your world for you,” said Johnson. “And you have to lean into the wise practices that God has given us as people to discern what is worth listening to and what's not.” “People say that God sent COVID-19 to bring the Church in America together to teach us the lesson. How could we know such a thing?” said Johnson, who also teaches biblical studies and theology at The King’s College in New York City. “But I certainly do believe that God is using this as a test of us. A test of who we trust and how we think about what's worth trusting and understanding.” Johnson joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to share about how the Bible discusses conspiracy theories, what Paul means when he writes about the mysteries of God, and what differentiates a conspiracy theory from a religion.  What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Dru Johnson Visit our guest’s website: Dru Johnson Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Last week, a video was leaked of a white man shooting and killing Georgia jogger Ahmaud Arbery in his neighborhood in Brunswick, Georgia. While Arbery’s death occurred in February, the alleged shooter and his father were only arrested last week following a massive public uproar following the release of the tape. Many Christians, of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, have condemned the Arbery’s killing. But widespread condemnation from the church for these types of killings was not always the case.For years, for white Christians, “the critique of lynching rarely moved beyond ‘Lynching is anarchy, and we need to kind of reinforce the rule of law,’” said Malcolm Foley, a PhD candidate in Baylor University’s Department of Religion, whose dissertation examines African-American Christian responses to lynching from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, Not surprisingly, the black church took a much more forceful response to these atrocities.“Many black pastors were commenting on this and saying, ‘If you can either stand in a mob of thousands of people and watch a black man be set on fire alive, or if you are one of the people holding the rifles that riddled this body with bullets, you're most likely not a Christian,’” said Foley, who is also the director of discipleship at Mosaic Waco. Foley joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss the colonial history of lynching, how beliefs about white women provided justification for this violence, and how lynchings changed the theology of the black and white church. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Malcolm Foley Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Last week, Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas announced plans for the city’s reopening. Churches are among the institutions that will be allowed to open this month: with one caveat. Any business or establishment that allows people to stay for more than 10 minutes must allow attendees or customers to sign a sheet with all their contact information, to allow for contact tracers to contact them if there was later a COVID-19 outbreak at the establishment.The conservative Christian law firm Liberty Counsel compared Kansas City’s actions those of Nazi Germany. “The Germans did this very thing to Jews – collecting the names and locations of all known synagogue attendees - in the early days of the Nazi regime,” Founder and Chairman Mat Staver wrote in a fundraising appeal. “Never in our wildest dreams could we have imagined Nazi-like measures designed to surveil, track and spy upon what was once a FREE American people. Yet that is exactly what Kansas City’s misguided government officials are now demanding.” Kansas City mishandled this situation, says Russell Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the Southern Baptist Convention’s policy arm. “I have almost no doubt that this was taking place due to very well-intentioned people, but there's a reason why that raises a sense of alarm in all kinds of people–and not just the conspiracy theory, propagating people who are complaining about having to wear masks in the grocery store,” he said. “...I think governments, even when they're well-intentioned, have to think through what are the implications going to be, how can somebody use this policy I'm putting into place in another time and for another reason, and how am I communicating it?” Moore joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss how COVID-19 may shape religious freedom battles in the future, where churches should look for wisdom and guidance as they reopen, and what he finds surprising about how congregations have responded to social distancing. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Russell Moore Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. As governors across the U.S. consider whether to relax stay at home orders, many are pitting the words “politics” and “economics” against the word “science.” California Governor Gavin Newsom, for example, told the Los Angeles Times.“We are going to do the right thing, not judge by politics, not judge by protests, but by science.” And as Governor Brian Kemp opened up Georgia, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms urged people to “Follow the data, look at the science, listen to the health care professionals and use your common sense.” Similar calls to “believe in science” or “listen to science” are all over policy debates and social media fights. But what does it mean to “believe in science”? And does “science” have a unified answer to questions like “who gets a ventilator,” or whether your child should go to summer camp? We should be cautious when suggesting that science can speak in such a unified voice, says Sy Garte, a biochemist who has taught at New York University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Rutgers University. “The idea that ‘science says’—suggesting that it's easy to come up with a consensus, a uniform, finished version of what is true—that's a problem because that's very rarely the case,” said Garte, who is also the editor in chief of God and Nature, a magazine from the American Scientific Affiliation. “One of the things you find out if you're a working scientist is that almost every answer brings up new questions. So we never actually finish learning anything in any field of science. We are continually trying to get deeper and learn more.” Garte joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss the historic distrust between Christians and science, what science can and cannot answer, and how Christians should engage in conversations with neighbors who are suspicious of science. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Learn more about Sy Garte’s Book: The Work of His Hands Read Sy’s testimony Read CT’s coverage of the BioLogos’ Francis Collins event Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. In October 2016, an Access Hollywood video clip of Donald Trump making demeaning remarks about women was leaked. In the aftermath of this revelation, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Al Mohler, wrote for The Washington Post. “Trump’s horrifying statements, heard in his own proud voice, revealed an objectification of women and a sexual predation that must make continued support for Trump impossible for any evangelical leader.” But last week, Mohler said that the “partisan divide had become so great” and Democrats had “swerved so far to the left” on issues of abortion, religious liberty, and LGBT issues that he planned to vote Republican for the rest of his life. This, of course, includes voting to reelect Trump this fall. One of the disappointing things about Mohler’s remarks was that they came during a pandemic and a terrible economic downturn, said conservative evangelical writer David French, who has been outspoken about his opposition to Trump since 2016. “While I don't put all that on Trump's feet, he just did some really incompetent things that had a severe cost,” said French. “And then to come in the middle of that, while we're bearing that cost, and to say ‘Four more years,’ seems to be indicating that evangelicals are saying, ‘As long as you're okay on the checklist, no matter your character, no matter what else is happening in the country, we're with you.’ I just found that to be very narrow.” French joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss what white evangelicals can learn about political engagement from black Christians, why white evangelicals by and large have not been disturbed by Trump’s cruelty, and at what points French’s own #NeverTrump convictions have been most-tested. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Find our guest on Twitter: David French Subscribe to The French Press Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary has the largest evangelical archeology program. It’s also the only evangelical institution to offer a doctoral degree in the field. But this school year will be its last. “We will no longer offer degrees in archaeology because they are incongruent with our mission to maximize resources in the training of pastors and other ministers of the gospel for the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention,” Southwestern announced in a statement.  Southwestern also suggested that its decision was linked to the spread of COVID-19 and the pandemic will curtail some digs this year, says John Monson, associate professor of Old Testament and Semitic languages at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. But ultimately, Monson doesn’t think that the disease is the greatest threat to the discipline. “This is a field that's been around since Napoleon Bonaparte, so about 1799, and it's weathered a lot more than this coronavirus,” said Monson, whose archaeological fieldwork has taken him to Syria, Lebanon, and numerous excavations in Israel. “And there's always been an interest in the Bible and there still is an interest in the Bible in much of the world today….I think the bigger challenge is going to be continued interest on the part of Christians and particularly evangelical institutions.” Monson joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss where Southwestern’s shutdown of their program leaves the state of biblical archeology, how apologetics fits into this discipline, and what happens when what scripture suggests and what is found on the ground doesn’t exactly line up. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. As coronavirus government restrictions have curtailed in-person Sunday services, thousands of pastors and church leaders have continued to reach their congregations through livestreams. But not all churches have the same technological infrastructure. And even for churches who might have access to a tripod, smartphone, microphone and Facebook Live--their members might not have bandwidth fast enough for live video or they themselves might not be comfortable accessing these new platforms.  Jonathan Brooks, the senior pastor at Canaan Community Church in Chicago’s West Englewood neighborhood, says that he has some fellow pastor friends whose churches are still meeting, in spite of the state’s coronavirus meeting bans. "But it's because of the giving. It's because if they don't physically have church, they won't get any money and their budget is not so that they can miss a Sunday,” said Brooks. “And so it’s such a conundrum, it’s such a quandary. Some folks just stop having church completely because they don't have anybody around them that can help them navigate this new way of being.” While Brooks’ church has been able to meet digitally, he recognizes that few in his congregation have the opportunity to move their work online. “To be honest with you, this is a white-collar pandemic. It's not a blue-collar pandemic,” he said. “The folks who serve us all and make things run still have to go to work, which is the majority of my congregation.” Brooks joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss how Canaan has navigated online giving, how he has injected creativity into his online Holy Week services, and what it’s like when your congregation says “Amen” over Zoom. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Jonathan Brooks Learn more about the Churches Helping Churches challenge Learn more about Canaan Community Church Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. In recent weeks, we’ve entered a world without professional sports and where millions of people are forced to remain in their homes. In other words, we’re entered a world ripe for a weird Netflix show to become a cultural phenomenon.  Enter Tiger King, a docuseries exploring the bizarre world of Americans who own dozens of exotic animals, including tigers and lions. So what makes big cats so alluring to people anyways? Part of it is their unique intelligence, says Mike Mooring, a professor of biology at Point Loma Nazarene who studies jaguars in Costa Rica.“I think that from time immemorial, people have had both this primeval fear coupled with a fascination with the big cats because they're mysterious,” said Mooring. “They come and go. You don't know where they are. They are elusive. They kind of pop out of the night and then they disappear.” Mooring joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss whether big cats can be tamed, what makes these felines special, and how studying wildlife in Southern Africa led him to Christ. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Read God Loves Protected Species. And the Poachers Who Kill Them. Read The Behemoth’s archives Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Within a matter of weeks, COVID-19 government restrictions have led thousands churches to livestream their services. This week, the Church Online Platform announced that it had reached a record-setting 7 million in church attendance worldwide, about seven times the attendance from just two weeks before. But for some pastors and church leaders, transitioning to this new normal has been challenging or at times painful. “I’m not going to tell you our service today will be awesome and unmissable, or the best online service that will change your life. I was sick and the sermon was just ok,” tweeted New York City based pastor Jon Tyson. “In fact I have found this online stuff sad and hard. Preaching to a camera is not what I was made for.” As pastors and church leaders with little livestreaming experience transition to this mode of communication, they should avoid getting too caught up with perfectionism, says Daniel Fusco, the lead pastor of Crossroads Community Church in Vancouver, Washington, whose church has years of livestreaming experience. “For every church, you need to do whatever you're doing in a way that is authentic to who you are,” said Fusco. “...People attend a specific church because it speaks to them.” Fusco joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss livestreaming best practices, how to think creatively in this medium, and what it's like for church leaders to prepare for a livestream v. a traditional Sunday morning service. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Visit our guest’s website: Daniel Fusco Read Daniel’s Preaching Today articles: Preaching, Technology, and COVID-19 Leading a Digital Church Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Prayer amid Pandemic is a podcast to encourage and sharpen the church during this season of coronavirus. Twice a week we’ll give you stories of Christian individuals and communities whose lives and faith were shaped by sickness. We’ll also get an update on the latest on the COVID-19 situation and pray together, hearing from Christians around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Last Sunday, hundreds of American churches closed their doors to congregants, many of whom watched via livestream. It may be like this for weeks. That same day, the Center for Disease Control urged Americans not to congregate in groups larger than 50.  These types of restrictions will have significant repercussions for many churches, where groups of 50 or larger gather on a weekly basis, especially with Easter just weeks away. As church leaders and pastors wrestle with these restrictions as well as navigating weddings and funerals, there’s a larger question we wanted to explore: What type of opportunity does a pandemic like this allow Christians to be remembered for? A strong empathy for the suffering of other people characterized much of the church’s response to sickness during the Roman Empire, says Gary Ferngren, a history professor at Oregon State University who studies the social history of ancient medicine, religion and ancient medicine.“The compassionate model in health care is, I think, the very distinctive contribution that Christians have made,” said Ferngren.  Ferngren joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and president and CEO Tim Dalrymple to discuss the state of healthcare in the Roman era, why the Christian response to the plague of Cyprian stood out, and how Christians came together to open hospitals. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Timothy Dalrymple Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Find all of Christianity Today’s coronavirus coverage  Read What Martin Luther Teaches Us About Coronavirus Read about Cicely Saunders, the founder of hospice care Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. On Monday, the Christian anti-hunger advocacy organization Bread for the World announced that Eugene Cho would be its next president. Cho is most well-known the founder of Seattle’s Quest Church and the nonprofit One Days Wages. He’s also the latest Korean American Christian male leader to assume a top spot in an evangelical organization. In 2013, Michael Oh became the global executive director/CEO of Lausanne. In 2015, Joel Kim became the president of Westminster Seminary California. In 2017, Alexander Jun was elected moderator of the 45th General Assembly for the Presbyterian Church in America or PCA. Last year, PCA pastor Walter Kim became the president of the National Association of Evangelicals and Julius Kim became the president of The Gospel Coalition. Vanderbilt Divinity School professor Paul Lim joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and news editor Daniel Silliman on Quick to Listen to discuss whether more Korean Americans in leadership will lead to greater cultural representation overall, the long relationship between Presbyterianism and Koreans, and what the church at large can learn from Korean Americans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Super Tuesday is upon us. After a primary here and a caucus there, Tuesday is when the greatest number of US states hold primary elections and caucuses. As the Democratic field narrows down, what type of success have candidates had in reaching out to Christians? The AND Campaign’s Justin Giboney and Michael Wear joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and CEO and president Tim Dalrymple to discuss the efforts that the Democratic field has made to reach religious voters, why white evangelicals vote so consistently for Democrats, and if Republicans will ever court black Christians. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Tim Dalrymple Learn more about the AND Campaign Follow Justin Giboney and Michael Wear Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. When Jean Vanier died last year at age 90, his life and his ministry of working with people with disabilities was nearly universally celebrated. “We don’t often find people born into privilege and status, and highly educated, who then follow the downward path of Jesus,” wrote Bethany McKinney Fox. “But as founder of L’Arche International, Vanier spent decades in community with people with and without intellectual disabilities and embraced the joys, complications, and demands that go along with such a life.” Then, last weekend, L’Arche International released a report, looking over a 30-year span, stating that multiple women told an investigative team about experiences of sexual assault with Vanier. “The relationships involved various kinds of sexual behavior often combined with so-called ‘mystical and spiritual’ justifications for this conduct,” it stated. The report went on to say that the women provided, “sufficient evidence to establish that Jean Vanier engaged in manipulative sexual relationships with at least 6 adult (not disabled) women. This number does not presume that there were no other cases, but takes into account spontaneously received testimony.”This news comes at a time when many are undoubtedly exhausted by the number of scandals and exploits of high-profile leaders.“ Right now, that this is starting to feel very routine is pointing to the fact that the church has done a very poor job of dealing with issues of sexuality and spirituality and power,” said Ruth Haley Barton, the founder of the Transforming Center, an ecumenical leadership organization. “We just don't talk about them and we haven't helped our leaders in our clergy know how to be with themselves around these issues.” For Barton, one of the keys for leaders is submitting themselves to spiritual direction. “It really is almost a non-negotiable if you want to stay the course and stay on your own journey of transformation, stay on your own journey of encounter with God while you are leading others,” she said. “You've just got to have this place outside the limelight where you can bring your whole self.” Barton joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss how to handle anger when learning these frustrating revelations, how to look at the relationship between power and sexuality, and how to process this seemingly never-ending bad news of disappointing leaders without losing your faith. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Read If You See Something Say Something Learn more about the Transforming Center Listen to Quick to Listen: Episode 160: Jean Vanier’s Faith Convicts All of Us Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Five years ago this month, ISIS executed 21 Christian men on a beach Libya. Their masked executors stood in all black behind the men, who knelt in a line wearing orange jumpsuits. After the Islamic State released a video of their murders, images of this massacre of Coptic Christians reverberated around the world. But despite the cultural impact left, Egyptian Christians have long experienced persecution, says Archbishop Angaelos, who serves in London. “The interesting thing is, we live it with a sense of resilience, but we have never fallen into a state of victimhood or triumphalism,” he said. “We realize that it is the cross of Christ. …It's not the end of the road because there is a resurrection that comes after the cross and the empty tomb. And so it is in that hope that we continue to live. And it's in that hope that we continue to carry that cross knowing that it will be removed from us.” Archbishop Angaelos, who still remembers the day he learned of the news recently joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Daniel Harrell to discuss why this act of persecution so greatly impacted the global church, the identity of the only non-Egyptian martyr, and whether the church will experience the same decline as it has in the rest of the Middle East. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Daniel Harrell Follow our guest on Twitter: Archbishop Angaelos Listen to Quick to Listen: Episode 38: How the Coptic Christian Church Endures Learn more about the 21 Martyrs film Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Last week, CT published an investigative report on allegations of spiritual abuse by Steve Timmis, who previously served as the CEO of the church planting ministry Acts 29. But long before assuming the leadership in 2014, Timmis was known for his model of intensive gospel community developed at his 120-person church in England known as The Crowded House and for his books like Total Church: A Radical Reshaping around Gospel and Community. But not everyone who was part of Timmis’s close-knit church community felt warmly toward the church leader. According to our report:  Fifteen people who served under Timmis described to Christianity Today a pattern of spiritual abuse through bullying and intimidation, overbearing demands in the name of mission and discipline, rejection of critical feedback, and an expectation of unconditional loyalty. People in these environments aren’t always aware they’re being abused, says Lisa Oakley, the co-author of Escaping the Maze of Spiritual Abuse: Creating Healthy Christian Cultures. “Psychological abuse is not a one-off. It's usually a series of incidents which when told by themselves can seem minimal,” said Oakley, now an assistant professor for the developmental psychology team at the University of Chester. “It's when you put that story together that you actually start to see this pattern of control.” Oakley joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss what people should do if they think they are being spiritually abused, how spiritual abuse can also affect pastors, and why it may be hard for people in close-knit communities to realize the unhealthy state of their church’s leadership. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Follow our guest on Twitter: Lisa Oakley Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Last week, the largest Christian adoption agency in the United States announced it will end international adoptions. More than 15,000 children had been adopted since the late 1970s through Bethany Christian Services.Bethany’s decision was not because they didn’t believe in the program but because of their “desire to serve children in their own communities,” said Kristi Gleason, the vice president for global services at Bethany, in a statement. “The future of adoption is working with local governments, churches, and social services professionals around the world to recruit and support local families for children and to develop and improve effective, safe in-country child welfare systems.” To that end, part of these efforts has meant turning away from institutionalized care, or orphanages. One of the leaders in this effort has been Ukraine, says Micala Siler, the executive director of A Family for Every Orphan.“From what I've seen in Romania and Ukraine firsthand most recently, because of the hard work of Christians to change cultural mindsets and help refine government system, these countries have the foundation to be countries without orphanages in the next 15 to 20 years.” said Siler. Siler joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss the bigger reasons why there’s been a move to move children from orphanages to familial situations, how adoption culture is growing in countries around the world, and the difference Christians have made in this conversation. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen Read LifeWay’s research on American Christians and adoptions Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Lunar New Year kicked off last week as millions of Chinese people left the cities they live for the homes they grew up in. For many, their trips coincided with the outbreak of the coronavirus, an epidemic that the government has responded to with intense travel restrictions in Wuhan, the city of 11 million, that’s ground zero for a disease that’s killed more than 100 people. The intensity of the quarantine has raised questions from outside observers like Emory University School of Medicine microbiologist Elaine Burd, who worry about the unintended consequences of the government’s move. As the government has “essentially ordered” the people in Wuhan to wear protective gear, it’s caused a shortage of equipment for those actually treating patients, she says.  “The biggest problem is that health care workers, who are taking care of sick patients, don't have enough protective gear, and this puts them at greater risk of catching the virus while they're taking care of patients,” said Burd. “From reports that I've seen, that seems to have created some panic among the group we call the ‘worried well.’ These people without symptoms but now don't have access to the protective equipment that the local government and public health officials said they should have. And so they feel vulnerable, maybe excessively vulnerable. So I think all of that really, it can create chaos.” Burd joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and CEO and president Tim Dalrymple about what people should know about the coronavirus, God’s call for her to become a microbiologist, and how her experiences working with an Ebola patient inform how she understands China’s current crisis.  What is Quick to Listen? Read more Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Tim Dalrymple Learn more about Eileen Burd Read a prayer from a pastor in Wuhan Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Australia's wildfires have consumed million acres of brushland, rainforests, and national parks. More than 30 people have died and according to some estimates, one billion animals have been killed. The area that has burned is roughly the size of England. As CT reported earlier this month, the fires have forced some Christian missions teams to evacuate. Hillsong announced several weeks ago that it had raised more than one million Australian dollars to support those affected by the fire. And the board of directors of A Rocha Australia, part of an international Christian conservation group, said it was building partnerships with Christian and non-Christian conservationists to aid with the recovery. As an aboriginal Christian, Brooke Prentis hopes the tragedy causes Christians and the country at large to commit to listening to the voices of Australia’s indigenous people, who have lived on the land for thousands of years. “My deep prayer and hope is that while this is a tragic situation for us, but maybe it's through tragedy that finally Aboriginal peoples are included as part of the fabric of our political, social, moral, and religious systems in Australia,” said Prentis, the incoming CEO of Common Grace, a Australian organization that organizes ecumenically around justice issues. “And that we can work together to work out how we look at this situation in our present and into our future, and how the past has affected that present and will affect our future if we don't come together.” Prentis joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and CEO and president Tim Dalrymple to discuss why she’s passionate about unity in the church, the tragic significance of January 26 for the aboriginal community, and how to pray for Australia during this time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Next week, we’ll remember the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr, who died 52 years ago this year. It’s also, of course, a time to reflect on the state of race relations within the church. One of those efforts has been the OneRace Movement, a group that has brought more than 500 Atlanta-area pastors of all ethnic and racial backgrounds together in the name of reconciliation and revival. In 2018, the movement hosted a worship service at Stone Mountain, the largest tourist attraction in the state of Georgia—and also where confederate heroes Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson are etched in granite. Why host an event meant to promote strengthening race relations at such a polemic site? “It's a place with a dark history, but also present cultural significance,” said Hazen Stephens, the co-director of OneRace. “...Biblically, whenever reformers would come in, the first thing that they would do is they would go to the high place and they would remove the Asherah poles and they would take down the idols. And we felt like what we were doing at Stone Mountain as we were calling church leaders to go to a place where spiritually an idol was erected over a 100 years ago, and to tear down that idol and say, this is not what our city stands for anymore.” Learning this type of history is part of OneRace’s model: Know the story. Own the story. Change the story. This knowledge is crucial for white Christians trying to gain credibility from Christians of color when they enter into these conversations, says co-director Josh Clemons. “If I were going to say something to the white church, I would say get invested in the story. It's time to listen,” he said. “It's time to hear from African American brothers and sisters. It's time to hear from Hispanic brothers and sisters. It's time to hear from Asian brothers and sisters. And how the story of race and the effects of race has impacted them. And, and then secondly, to be invested in that history so that we can own and ultimately change the story for generations to come.” Stephens and fellow co-director Josh Clemons joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and CEO and president Tim Dalrymple to discuss the name of the initiative, how they’ve tried to make their day on Stone Mountain more than a “mountaintop experience,” and how the movement has also encouraged Christians from different denominations to partner together.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Several months ago, Christianity Today’s past editor in chief Mark Galli announced his retirement and Friday was his last day. This also means that Mark’s time as Quick to Listen co-host has concluded. In the interim, Christianity Today’s CEO and president, Timothy Dalrymple, will take the reins as co-host. Christianity Today’s new editor chief? Longtime pastor and writer Daniel Harrell, who most recently served as senior minister of Colonial Church in Edina, Minnesota. Harrell lost his wife Dawn unexpectedly last Easter and the aftermath of his death has been difficult. “A big part of this next season of my life is devoted to her legacy and her love for words and theology and for Christ and wanting to live that well for her, for my daughter, and for myself.  said Harrell. Daniel joined longtime host and digital media producer Morgan Lee and new host Tim to discuss his memories of Billy Graham, the themes of his three books on the Old Testament, evolution, and the saints, and what it’s like to hear a call to ministry at a frat party.  This episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you by The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, which offers rigorous theological education for future ministers of the gospel. Find out more about Southern Seminary at sbts.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. When did we forget God? It’s a provocative question. And it’s the name of outgoing Christianity Today editor in chief Mark Galli’s latest book. After years working in this world, Galli believes that evangelical Christians’ strong suit today is the love of neighbor be it prayer gathering to evangelism to social justice to acts of mercy. We talk about God a lot and worship him and pray to him regularly. But on the other hand, relatively few Christians take with equal seriousness the command to love God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength. If we do talk about the love of God, it is said that we love God by loving our neighbor. True enough, but that is hardly a complete answer, nor one that would have satisfied Christians of other eras. So what would look like to love God with this sort of passionate and all encompassing fury today? Or, to put it in classical terms, what it looks like to strive to behold the beatific vision, that is, the vision of God himself, a striving driven by an unswerving desire to know God intimately, face to face, and thus to love him with earthly and heavenly intensity? For his last Quick to Listen episode Galli digital media producer Morgan Lee spoke with Hans Boersma, the author of Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in Christian Tradition, to discuss would look like to love God with passionate and all-encompassing fury today and what difference this move might make in our lives and in the world around us. What is Quick to Listen? Read more Subscribe to Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our host on Twitter: Morgan Lee Subscribe to Mark’s newsletter: The Galli Report Visit Hans Boersma’s website Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Last week, a California couple’s two-year-old daughter stopped breathing and died. In the wake of the tragedy, the parents, Andrew and Kalley Heiligenthal, had an unusual response:  "We are asking for bold, unified prayers from the global church to stand with us in belief that He will raise this little girl back to life. Her time here is not done, and it is our time to believe boldly, and with confidence wield what King Jesus paid for. It’s time for her to come to life,” Kalley, a worship leader and songwriter at Bethel Church, wrote on Instagram, where she has more than 250 thousand followers. In response to her words, hundreds of people posted under the hashtag, #wakeupolive. Reaction to the Heiligenthal’s actions has been polarized. But according to apologist Lee Strobel, the family’s belief in miracles is similiar to that of many others. In a Barna study about prayer and healing that he commissioned for his recent The Case for Miracles, Strobel asked a sample of American adults if there was anything in their life they could only explain as being a miracle. “Thirty-eight percent of American adults said yes,” said Strobel. “Now if you extrapolate that number that would mean that there would be 94 million miracles just in the United States!” Strobel joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss what is unique or interesting about Jesus’s miracles, how the Protestant Reformation changed Christians’ understanding of miracles, and whether or not Christians should pray for their loved ones to come back to life.  What is Quick to Listen? Read more Subscribe to Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our host on Twitter: Morgan Lee Subscribe to Mark’s newsletter: The Galli Report Learn more about Stan Jones’s books Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Last week, four members of Congress wrote to the Department of Justice asking that it "declare the prosecution of obscene pornography a criminal justice priority and urge your US attorneys to bring prosecutions against the major producers and distributors of such material.” This letter came in light of the internet exponentially increasing the proliferation of porn which is “especially harmful to youth, who are being exposed to obscene pornography at exponentially younger ages." As children can increasingly learn about sex from peers and digital devices, parents should be intentional about trying to make sure their kids hear about it first from them, says Stan Jones, who has authored a number of Christian sex ed books, along with his life Brenna Jones. Unfortunately, when it comes to giving their children “the talk,” “parents are often terrified of being asked, ‘Well, what did you do when at such-and-such an age?’” said Jones. “The unresolved hurt, guilt, shame from the past just causes parents to put it off and put it off.” Jones joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss how the sexual revolution changed sex, the digital revolution changed sex, and how Christians parents and caretakers can get better at educating kids about sex. What is Quick to Listen ? Read more Subscribe to Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our host on Twitter: Morgan Lee Subscribe to Mark’s newsletter: The Galli Report Learn more about Stan Jones’s books Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Last Saturday, Reinhard Bonnke, a prominent German evangelist in Africa, passed away at the age of 79. Bonnke’s ministry began in 1967 and lasted for 50 years. Millions of people attended his crusades, leading him to be dubbed by some as“the Billy Graham of Africa.” In 2000, CT sent a reporter to see him in Nigeria: Sunday night Bonnke delivered a sermon on the first chapters of Acts—when the apostles received the Holy Spirit. He then told the audience: "Jesus is here with all the fire you will ever need! Raise your voices! Receive the Holy Spirit now!" Thousands in the crowd began wailing, screaming, and crying. Frantically waving their hands in the air, many begged loudly for anointing. Bonnke gave a similar message on Saturday night to 1.3 million people on the crusade ground. Building momentum with the audience, the evangelist instructed the crowd to begin shouting "Alleluia!" until the Holy Spirit entered their bodies. "You are going to speak in new tongues—a language you have never learned," he told them. "It comes from you're heart. Don't be afraid—this is fantastic!" Behind Bonnke’s massive popularity was a deep sense of humility, says Nimi Wariboko, the Walter G. Muelder professor of social ethics at the Boston University School of Theology. “Something that will strike you about Reinhard Bonnke and the way he relates to Africa and the way he works is that he believes in Africa and he loves Africa and he loves Africans,” said Wariboko. “….The man never portrayed himself as one of these white guys coming on the white horse with a savior mentality to save Africa. He didn’t ever pretend that God had called him to the whole world. His focus was on Africa and he never lost that.” Wariboko joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss how a German evangelist became passionate about Africa, how he differed from other Pentecostal preachers, and how his work affected the church on this continent. What is “Quick to Listen”? Read more Subscribe to Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our host on Twitter: Morgan Lee Subscribe to Mark’s newsletter: The Galli Report Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola This episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you in part by Wesley Seminary at Indiana Wesleyan University, which offers a practical, student-centered approach to seminary. Wesley Seminary’s model connects applicable coursework with active ministry. For more information, visit seminary.indwes.edu. This episode of Quick to Listen is also brought to you by Christianbook.com, your go-to source for everything Christian. Books, Bibles, gifts, music and more, all in one place. And always from people who share your values. Go to Christianbook.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. The prominent complementarian theologian Wayne Grudem has changed his mind about divorce. Last month, Grudem told evangelical scholars at the Evangelical Theological Society that a closer reading of 1 Corinthians 7:15 had led him to conclude that the Bible permits divorce when there is abuse. Many pastors have told the theologian that they have found what he shared extremely helpful, says Grudem, a professor of theology and biblical studies at Phoenix Seminary.  “I just had a pastor write to me just recently saying, ‘I had felt uneasy about what I thought was the biblical position for years, but I couldn't see an alternative.’ He said, ‘Thank you. This is so helpful,’” said Grudem. “...They see the value of this alternative understanding of a ground for divorce, and it seems right to them from their reading of Scripture and from their dealing with real-life situations.” Grudem joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss his process of re-studying 1 Corinthians 7:15 and the role that hearing from victims played in prompting him to return to scripture. What is “Quick to Listen”? Read more Subscribe to Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our host on Twitter: Morgan Lee Subscribe to Mark’s newsletter: The Galli Report Visit our guest’s website: Wayne Grudem Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola This episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you in part by Intensional. D.A. Horton unpacks how God addresses these issues and where to take it from there in his new book Intensional. Go to dahorton.com to learn more about Intensional. This episode of Quick to Listen is also brought to you by Christianbook.com, your go-to source for everything Christian. Books, Bibles, gifts, music and more, all in one place. And always from people who share your values. Go to Christianbook.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Last month, Pew Research Center published survey data from 2018 and 2019 on religion and Americans. The big takeaway: the number of non-religiously affiliated Americans was growing; the number of Christians was declining. Here’s how they summed it up: "The changes underway in the American religious landscape are broad-based. The Christian share of the population is down and religious “nones” have grown across multiple demographic groups: white people, black people and Hispanics; men and women; in all regions of the country; and among college graduates and those with lower levels of educational attainment. Religious “nones” are growing faster among Democrats than Republicans, though their ranks are swelling in both partisan coalitions. And although the religiously unaffiliated are on the rise among younger people and most groups of older adults, their growth is most pronounced among young adults." To talk about these numbers and what they suggest about the future of Christianity in the US, Quick to Listen turned to CT’s news editor Daniel Silliman, who has closely studied American religious life. Daniel joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss why Christianity continues to decline, the relationship that “nones” have to faith, and what similarities or differences these numbers have with the religious situation in Western Europe. This episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you in part by Intensional. D.A. Horton unpacks how God addresses these issues and where to take it from there in his new book Intensional. Go to dahorton.com to learn more about Intensional. This episode of Quick to Listen is also brought to you by Christianbook.com, your go-to source for everything Christian. Books, Bibles, gifts, music and more, all in one place. And always from people who share your values. Go to Christianbook.com. What is “Quick to Listen”? Read more Subscribe to Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our host on Twitter: Morgan Lee Subscribe to Mark’s newsletter: The Galli Report Follow our guest on Twitter: D aniel Silliman Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Earlier this fall, the Trump administration announced that the US would accept no more than 18,000 refugees in the coming fiscal year. Here’s how CT reported this news: "President Trump’s administration has dramatically cut the number of refugees admitted to the US every year since taking office. Last year, CT reported on evangelicals condemning the decision to drop the refugee ceiling to then-historic low of 30,000 for the 2019 fiscal year. The year before, it was down to 45,000. Up until then, the cap for resettling refugees in the US hadn’t gone below 70,000 in 30 years." While in many years, the US has frequently accepted more refugees than other countries, the number has almost always been a tiny fraction of its overall population. Meanwhile, Jordan, a country of just under 10 million, is currently home to 762,420 refugees. One Christian working with hundreds of these refugees is Father Khalil Jaar, the priest at St Mary’s Catholic Church in Marka Jordan. Father Jaar ministers to Iraqi and Syrian families by providing them with food, education, and other provisions. Father Jaar joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli discuss his work with Syrian and Iraqi refugees, what happened when he was kidnapped in Iraq, and how God continues to provide for the community. This episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you in part by Wesley Seminary at Indiana Wesleyan University, which offers a practical, student-centered approach to seminary. Wesley Seminary’s model connects applicable coursework with active ministry. For more information, visit seminary.indwes.edu. This episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you in part by Intensional. D.A. Horton unpacks how God addresses these issues and where to take it from there in his new book Intensional. Go to dahorton.com to learn more about Intensional. This episode of Quick to Listen is also brought to you by Christianbook.com, your go-to source for everything Christian. Books, Bibles, gifts, music and more, all in one place. And always from people who share your values. Go to Christianbook.com.

What is “Quick to Listen”? Read more Subscribe to Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our host on Twitter: Morgan Lee Subscribe to Mark’s newsletter: The Galli Report Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. As is now well known, millions of evangelical Christians supported Donald Trump and helped lead him to victory on November 8, 2016 in his stunning upset over Hillary Clinton. Besides Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, Jr., among the better known evangelicals who have support Mr. Trump are James Robison, host of the TV program Life Today, David Jeremiah, senior pastor of Shadow Mountain Community Church, a Southern Baptist megachurch in El Cajon, California, Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist, Dallas, Texas, and Jack Graham, pastor of Prestonwood Baptist in Prestonwood, Texas. Until recently, there hasn’t been as much focus on Trump’s more charismatic and prosperity gospel supporters. In fact, many in these circles were convinced to vote for Trump in 2016 because prophets in the movements believed Trump was destined by God to become president as early as 2015. Two lesser-known charismatics who have been on Trump’s Evangelical council are Jentezen Franklin, senior pastor, Free Chapel Worship Center, Gainesville, Georgia, and Robert Morris, pastor of Gateway Church, a multi-site megachurch of some 36,000 attenders based in Southlake, Texas, near Fort Worth. Two prominent supporters, both associated strongly with the prosperity gospel, are Kenneth Copeland and Paula White, both of whom have also been a part of the President’s council. White has had a particularly close pastoral relationship with President Trump, starting years before he took office. And recently, she’s been appointed by Trump to the Office of Public Liaison, which is responsible for communicating and interacting with various interest groups. On this edition of Quick to Listen, we want to delve more deeply into Trump’s charismatic and properity gospel supporters, and especially Paula White, to better understand the social and political passions and concerns of this religious movement. Our guest is James A. Beverley, research professor of Christian thought and ethics at Tyndale Seminary in Toronto, Canada. He is also Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion in Texas. He has been a contributor Christianity Today, Faith Today, and Charisma magazines. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including Nelson’s Illustrated Guide to Religion and Religions A to Z, and most recently, Donald Trump, God, and Christian Prophecy: A Guide to the Prophets and Prophecies in the Charismatic-Pentecostal World concerning the 45th President. This episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you in part by Intensional. D.A. Horton unpacks how God addresses these issues and where to take it from there in his new book Intensional. Go to dahorton.com to learn more about Intensional. This episode of Quick to Listen is also brought to you by Christianbook.com, your go-to source for everything Christian. Books, Bibles, gifts, music and more, all in one place. And always from people who share your values. Go to Christianbook.com. This episode of Quick to Listen is also brought to you by Meant for More, a nationwide movement of students sharing the gospel at public school in March 2020. To learn more about how you can help equip students to reach their schools for Christ, visit Meantformore.org.  What is “Quick to Listen”? Read more Subscribe to Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our host on Twitter: Morgan Lee Subscribe to Mark’s newsletter: The Galli Report Follow our guest on Twitter: Emily Belz Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Non-disclosure agreements (NDA) started in the tech world as a way to protect trade secrets. But they haven’t stayed there.A recent World Magazine story noted: "This practice from corporate America is now common among religious nonprofits. Done right, confidentiality agreements help institutions protect members’ privacy and can fend off ruinous litigation. But NDAs can also mask institutional disease and leader misconduct. And even when an institution doesn’t enforce its NDA, the widespread institutional fear of liability can lead to unintended, devastating outcomes." In her reporting, World Magazine’s Emily Belz examined a number of Christian ministry NDAs and spoke with former employees who had signed them. She joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli this week on Quick to Listen to discuss why this practice has become so common among Christian ministries, who it serves, and who it hurts. This episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you in part by Intensional. D.A. Horton unpacks how God addresses these issues and where to take it from there in his new book Intensional. Go to dahorton.com to learn more about Intensional. This episode of Quick to Listen is also brought to you by Christianbook.com, your go-to source for everything Christian. Books, Bibles, gifts, music and more, all in one place. And always from people who share your values. Go to Christianbook.com. What is “Quick to Listen”? Read more Subscribe to Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our host on Twitter: Morgan Lee Subscribe to Mark’s newsletter: The Galli Report Follow our guest on Twitter: Emily Belz Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Rapper Kanye West is one of the biggest pop culture personalities of our time. His critically-acclaimed and chart-topping music, premium fashion line, controversial public persona, blunt political opinions and his marriage to Kim Kardashian West keep the Chicago hip-hop artist consistently in the news. Last week, West finally released his much-teased and highly anticipated album “Jesus Is King.” In much the same fashion as anything West does, the reaction to an album full of gospel music and theological lyrics has been enormous and polarizing. Some Christians see Kanye's life as just the highs and lows of an extreme and public display of what it looks like to walk with God over the course of a life. Others may see his conversion as more of a linear event that culminated sometime in the past year, which included this album and also the beginning of his hosting pop-up Christian services around the country. How you understand Kanye’s conversion probably depends on the spiritual tradition someone comes from says Femi Olutade, one of the hosts for the hit music podcast, Dissect. “If you come from more of a classical evangelical background, there's a lot of focus that's on kind of conversion stories and this kind of momentary ‘born again,’ born from above kind of experience, where everything changes,” said Olutade. “You have this overwhelming sense of emotion or thought that is just radically different before and after.”But not all Christians have the same understanding of conversion. "I would say that in the largest span of understanding Christian faith and life, [conversion] is one moment over a much larger period of what it means to follow God,” said Olutade. “...And I think it's something that's a constant struggle, that takes constant repentance, constant forgiveness, constant tears, and constant working through.” Olutade joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and Wes Jakacki to discuss Kanye’s long relationship with Christianity and what is and isn’t different in 2019. This episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you in part by Christianbook.com. Over five hundred thousand Christian products to choose from, all in one place, and always from people who share your values. Christianbook.com. This episode is also brought to you by the Wheaton College Graduate School. Respected and represented the world over, the Psy.D. in Clinical Psychology at the Wheaton College Graduate School will inspire, challenge, and equip you to be a servant scholar for Christ and His Kingdom. Learn more at wheaton.edu/QTL What is “Quick to Listen”? Read more Subscribe to Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Wes Jakacki Subscribe to Mark’s newsletter: The Galli Report Find our guest, Femi Olutade on Twitter, on his podcast, Dissect, and on Medium. Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Last week, John MacArthur celebrated 50 years in the pastorate at a conference at his congregation Grace Community Church. During the event, MacArthur accused the Southern Baptist Convention of taking a “headlong plunge” toward allowing women preachers after women spoke at the SBC’s 2019 annual meeting. That, he said, was a sign the denomination no longer believed in biblical authority.“When you literally overturn the teaching of Scripture to empower people who want power, you have given up biblical authority,” said MacArthur, as a Religious News Service story reported. A moderator also asked MacArthur and his fellow panelists to offer their gut reactions to one- or two-word phrases. When the moderator said “Beth Moore,” MacArthur replied, “Go home.” MacArthur has never shied away from controversy. Last year, he helped organize a controversial statement responding to social justice. He has frequently spoken out against the modern Charismatic movement. Part of the impetus behind MacArthur’s tendency to speak out comes from how he understands his belief in a high authority of Scripture, says Jonathan Holmes, a pastor and counselor who graduated from the Master’s College and worked there for several years. “There are a lot of things many evangelicals would say are non-essentials, for instance, a woman's role in the church, or drinking, or dancing, or creation or the end times,” said Holmes. “But those all become major touchpoints for MacArthur because his view of Scripture is such that if you budge on the grammatical, literal interpretation of the Bible in any of these areas, the whole thing begins to fall apart.” Holmes joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss whether MacArthur is a fundamentalist or evangelical, whether he has ever changed his mind with regards to his own theological convictions, and what to make of a Master’s Seminary grad preaching at one of Kanye West’s Sunday Services. Today's episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you in part by Baylor University’s Truett Seminary, where Kingdom-minded women and men are equipped to follow their callings. By learning to think theologically, developing ministry skills, cultivating a community of support, and engaging in spiritual formation, Truett students are uniquely prepared to make an impact in the Church and the world. Learn more at baylor.edu/truett. This episode of Quick to Listen is also brought to you by Christianbook.com. With over 500,000 products to choose from, Christianbook.com brings everything Christian right to your fingertips. Go to Christianbook.com. This episode is also brought to you by the Wheaton College Graduate School. Respected and represented the world over, the Master of Arts in Marriage and Family Therapy at the Wheaton College Graduate School will inspire, challenge, and equip you to be a servant scholar for Christ and His Kingdom. Learn more at wheaton.edu/QTL. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Last week President Trump abruptly announced that American soldiers would be leaving Kurdish-controlled territory in Syria. The news shocked the US military. It was also an unwelcome surprise to Kurdish fighters, whom the US had backed in the fight against ISIS. The announcement was good news for Syria's neighbor Turkey who have long fought the Kurdish guerrilla group known as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The PKK has waged a decades-long insurgency inside Turkey and both Turkey and the US consider it a terrorist organization. Shortly after Trump’s announcement, Turkish troops began a military assault on the Kurdish-controlled parts of Syria. Many of the Christians that live in that area have fled to Armenia, says Charlie Costa, who pastors a congregation in Beirut and actively plants churches in the Middle East. “But of course, that empties the area of any Christian witness, at least theoretically or on a human level,” said Costa. “It leaves the place without a witness for Christ. Even those who support the President were disappointed with that because the view in the Middle East is always that America protects Christians.” Costa joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to learn why Kurds are coming to Christ, the community’s long history of persecution, and how Middle Eastern Christians view American Christians.  This episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you in part by Fearfully and Wonderfully: The Marvel of Bearing God's Image, a newly updated and combined book by Paul Brand and Philip Yancey, from InterVarsity Press. For 40% off and free US shipping on this book and any other IVP title, visit ivpress.com and use promo code POD19. This episode of Quick to Listen is also brought to you by Wesley Seminary at Indiana Wesleyan University, which offers a practical, student-centered approach to seminary. Wesley Seminary’s model connects applicable coursework with active ministry. For more information, visit http://seminary.indwes.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Right now, the Roman Catholic Church leaders are in the midst of a three-week-long meeting discussing the future of their ministry in the Amazon. Among the issues the synod is investigating: how church leaders should respond to chronic priest shortages, the role of women in official church leadership, and environmental degradation. Under the previous popes, John Paul II and Benedict the XVI, synods—or meetings convening all of the top brass of the Catholic church—were largely symbolic, says Christopher White, the national correspondent for the Catholic publication Crux. Not so with Pope Francis. “His two synods on the family wrestled with, among other issues, communion. And in the end, after two synods and two years of deliberation, Pope Francis issued a document that allowed for a cautious opening to communion for divorced and remarried Catholics, which did move forward the Church's pastoral teaching on that particular issue,” said White. White suggested that the Amazon synod may conclude similarly. “Among the many issues that they're going to be discussing in Rome over the next three weeks is perhaps relaxing the celibacy requirement for priests because there is such a shortage of priests in the particular region of the Amazon. And they're grappling with what to do about it,” he said. White joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the real or symbolic importance of synods, what makes the Amazon region particularly vexing to the Church, and why Protestants should stay abreast of an important Catholic meeting. Today's episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you in part by Baylor University’s Truett Seminary, where Kingdom-minded women and men are equipped to follow their callings. By learning to think theologically, developing ministry skills, cultivating a community of support, and engaging in spiritual formation, Truett students are uniquely prepared to make an impact in the Church and the world. Learn more at baylor.edu/truett. This episode of Quick to Listen is also brought to you by Brotherhood Mutual Insurance Company, a ministry-focused insurance and payroll provider serving Christian churches, schools, and related ministries. For more information, visit BrotherhoodMutual.com.

This episode of Quick to Listen is also brought to you by the MA in Humanitarian & Disaster Leadership program at Wheaton College Graduate School, preparing leaders to serve the most vulnerable and the Church globally. For more information, go to wheaton.edu/HDL. What is “Quick to Listen”? Read more Subscribe to Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our host on Twitter: Morgan Lee Subscribe to Mark’s newsletter: The Galli Report Follow our guest on Twitter: Christopher White Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries. Last month, the hip-hop artist Lecrae got baptized for a second time in the Jordan River. Afterwards, he posted a picture of the event on Instagram. From CT’s reporting:   The Grammy winner responded to one follower who suggested that since Lecrae already has new life in Christ, the Jordan baptism was just a “weird bath in a very significant place.” “1. It’s Mikvah,” Lecrae replied, referencing the Jewish ritual bath that predates Christian baptism and also represented new life. “2. Jesus was God already and still was baptized. 3. Celebrate the heart vs. criticizing the information.”But despite Lecrae’s response, many on social media made it clear that they were still theologically uncomfortable with the hip-hop artist’s decision.   Baptism has long been a divisive sacrament in church history. The argument over Lecrae’s Jordan River baptism stem from a debate over the action really means, says Matthew Knell, who teaches historical theology and church history at the London School of Theology. “[Today], we talk about 'I'm going to get baptized. I want to get baptized,' said Knell. “But the church would say that baptism is something that happens to you, rather than you being the initiator.” In other words, “It's not my initiative, it's the divine work in me that's happening in baptism.” Knell joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss why disagreements over baptism have led Christians to persecute other Christians and how the church has sought unity even in their disagreements over the sacrament.W What is “Quick to Listen”? Read more Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our host on Twitter: Morgan Lee Subscribe to Mark’s newsletter: The Galli Report Learn more about guest Matthew Knell Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder This episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you in part by Fearfully and Wonderfully: The Marvel of Bearing God's Image, a newly updated and combined book by Paul Brand and Philip Yancey, from InterVarsity Press. For 40% off and free US shipping on this book and any other IVP title, visit ivpress.com and use promo code POD19. This episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you in part by Kinship United, a non-profit organization working with every day superheroes like you to rescue orphans and widows from abuse, trafficking, or worse, for the past nineteen years. To learn more about how you can save a life, visit KinshipUnited.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Most Friday nights during the school year, a group of Wheaton College students takes the train into downtown Chicago together. Their purpose? To share the gospel with the people they meet that night in the city. Last year, Wheaton’s Chicago Evangelism Team traveled to Millenium Park, home to one of the city’s most popular attractions: the Bean. When students began to approach people with pamphlets, a park employee told students they were forbidden from doing so. Similarly, when one student began preaching, they were told that they were breaking a Chicago ordinance. Read The Chicago Tribune’s report. This account comes from the lawsuit four students filed against the city of Chicago last week, alleging that the city’s park rules improperly restricted their freedom of speech. The rules divided up the park into 11 sections and banned the public from “the making of speeches and passing out of written communications” in all but one of the sections. That section was not the Bean, which was where the students specifically wanted to evangelize.  The public’s strong reaction against evangelism comes as more and more companies are aggressively trying to sell you on their brands and products, says R. York Moore, the national evangelist for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship USA.  “Now, as we see, people tend to associate proselytization with big tech companies or someone trying to sell you a credit card,” he said. “...It’s no longer unique.” Moore joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss why evangelism can make us feel uncomfortable, what bad evangelism looks like, and what makes public proclamation of one’s faith beautiful and unique.  This episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you in part by Fearfully and Wonderfully: The Marvel of Bearing God's Image, a newly updated and combined book by Paul Brand and Philip Yancey, from InterVarsity Press. For 40% off and free US shipping on this book and any other IVP title, visit ivpress.com and use promo code POD19. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Though one can argue that evangelical religion has been in crisis from the beginning, starting in November 2016 and the election of Donald Trump, it exploded afresh. Not only did the nation wake up to discover a chasm dividing in the country, so did evangelicals--especially when it became clear that white evangelicals voted for and then supported the new president, depending on the poll, in the range of 75 to 81 percent. The evangelical left was shocked and horrified by this, and the evangelical right was mystified by their outrage. Many Black, Asian, and Hispanic evangelicals—if they still identified with the term at all--looked at white evangelicals left and right and just shook their heads, wondering if either side really got it. We now have a cacophony of voices shouting at one another, and much of the shouting is about two questions: “So, what is an evangelical Christian anyway?” And more to the point, “Does it even matter?” To help explore those questions, we invited Thomas Kidd, the Vardaman Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University, to speak with us. He is the author of many important history books, including The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America ; George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father and most recently, Who Is an Evangelical? A History of a Movement in Crisis. What is “Quick to Listen”? Read more Subscribe to Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our host on Twitter: Morgan Lee Follow our guest host: Kyle Rohane Subscribe to Mark’s newsletter: The Galli Report Follow our guest on Twitter: Thomas S. Kidd See our guest's books: Books by Thomas Kidd Today's episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you in part by Baylor University’s Truett Seminary, where Kingdom-minded women and men are equipped to follow their callings. By learning to think theologically, developing ministry skills, cultivating a community of support, and engaging in spiritual formation, Truett students are uniquely prepared to make an impact in the Church and the world. Learn more at baylor.edu/truett. This episode of Quick to Listen is also brought to you by Focus on the Family’s Bring Your Bible to School Day powered by students nationwide October 3rd. When you sign up to participate, you’ll also be entered to win a trip to the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Benny Hinn made an announcement last week. “I am correcting my own theology and you need to all know it. The blessings of God are not for sale. And miracles are not for sale. And prosperity is not for sale,” he said during his weekly TV broadcast. His comments made waves. Hinn is one of the biggest names of a movement known broadly as the prosperity gospel. (His nephew wrote for CT about rejecting its theology.) Those seen as part of the movement—be they Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar, or Paula White—are often attacked for their health and wealth teachings. But determining the limits of the movement—especially when it exists around the world—isn’t easy, says Candy Gunther Brown, a professor of religious studies at Indiana University. “Anytime you use a phrase like ‘prosperity gospel’ whether it’s in a North American context or whether it’s the Global South, it’s necessary to be very conscious to not paint things in too broad of strokes,” said Brown. “You need to be careful to respect the variety in the Global South and not idealize any more than you paint under the same brush of criticism. There’s variety in teachings, whether you’re talking about Nigeria or Brazil or South Korea.” Brown joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss how much influence prosperity gospel preachers actually have, what President Trump thinks about the prosperity gospel, and where the millennial leaders are in this movement. What is “Quick to Listen”? Read more

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Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder This episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you in part by Fearfully and Wonderfully: The Marvel of Bearing God's Image, a newly updated and combined book by Paul Brand and Philip Yancey, from InterVarsity Press. For 40% off and free US shipping on this book and any other IVP title, visit ivpress.com and use promo code POD19.

This episode of Quick to Listen is also brought to you by Focus on the Family’s Bring Your Bible to School Day powered by students nationwide October 3rd. When you sign up to participate, you’ll also be entered to win a trip to the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last month, the New York Times Magazine devoted an entire publication to remembering the 400th anniversary of American slavery. In the introduction to the project, it wrote,The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.But the transatlantic slave trade goes back to the 15th century, when Portuguese merchants began trading North African people as slaves. The industry’s growth happened alongside massive changes in the church, including the Reformation in 1517 and subsequent church fighting and division between Catholics and Protestants.  To understand the church’s beliefs about slavery at the time, you have to go back to the Patristic period, says Michael A. G. Haykin, a professor of church history and biblical spirituality at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Augustine and Aquinas argued that while slavery was not part of God’s first intention, it was a result of the fall—a conclusion embraced by the church for years. “The only clear abolitionist in the patristic period is Gregory of Nyssa who argues that slavery violates the image of God in man, to hold another individual as a possession is a violation of his human dignity and value in the sight of God,” said Haykin. Haykin joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the genesis of the church’s views on slavery, how the missions movement affected the slave trade, and the role of the Quakers in pricking the Protestant conscience on this atrocity.  What is “Quick to Listen”? Read more

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Today's episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you in part by Baylor University’s Truett Seminary, where Kingdom-minded women and men are equipped to follow their callings. By learning to think theologically, developing ministry skills, cultivating a community of support, and engaging in spiritual formation, Truett students are uniquely prepared to make an impact in the Church and the world. Learn more at baylor.edu/truett. This episode of Quick to Listen is also brought to you by Things Above Podcast: Heavenly Thinking for Earthly Engagement. This episode of Quick to Listen is also brought to you by Brotherhood Mutual Insurance Company, a ministry-focused insurance and payroll provider serving Christian churches, schools, and related ministries. For more information, visit BrotherhoodMutual.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The Evangelical Free Church of America (EFCA) has changed its position on end times doctrine. The denomination recently voted to drop the word “premillennial” from its statement of faith. So what prompted the change? “We say that we ‘major on the majors and minor on the minors,” the EFCA said in an internal document. The denomination noted that they did not take a stance on the Reformed v. Arminian view of conversion, the age of the earth, infant v. adult baptism, and whether the gifts of the spirit had ceased or were still active. In light of that, “we believe there is a significant inconsistency in continuing to include premillennialism as a required theological position when it is clear that the nature of the millennium is one of those doctrines over which theologians, equally knowledgeable, equally committed to the Bible, and equally Evangelical, have disagreed through the history of the church,” the document stated. The church has held multiple positions on the End Times held by the Early Church fathers, says Daniel Hummel, a historian of US religion and foreign relations. “But in more recent evangelical history, postmillennialism dominated in the early part of American history and colonial history,” said Hummel. “People like Jonathan Edwards saw revivals as inaugurating the millennium, as bringing in this deeply Christian era that would last a thousand years and then conclude with Jesus personally returning.” Then, after the carnage of the Civil War, Americans became more pessimistic, which, in turn, affected their eschatological views. “Premillennialism become sort of the main tradition and the air that a lot of evangelicals breathe throughout the 20th century,” said Hummel. Hummel joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the rise and fall of premillennialism, the influence of Left Behind, and the significance of the EFCA’s decision. What is “Quick to Listen”? Read more Follow the podcast on Twitter

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This episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you in part by Fearfully and Wonderfully: The Marvel of Bearing God's Image, a newly updated and combined book by Paul Brand and Philip Yancey, from InterVarsity Press. For 40% off and free US shipping on this book and any other IVP title, visit ivpress.com and use promo code POD19. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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"It’s certainly not linear. Grief is not like that. Grief is all over the map, that’s part of the difficulty of it. You can feel like you’ve gotten through a lot of it, and then feel like you’re back at the beginning again." - Diane Langberg, author of Suffering and the Heart of God All six episodes release Monday, August 26th. Subscribe now at Living and Effective.com.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last month, Snopes fact-checked an article from the satire site The Babylon Bee. On its website, Snopes explained its rationale:The Babylon Bee has managed to confuse readers with its brand of satire in the past. This particular story was especially puzzling for some readers, however, as it closely mirrored the events of a genuine news story, with the big exception of the website’s changing the location. We found dozens of instances of social media users who were puzzled by this article.Meanwhile, The Bee’s CEO told Fox News that Snopes running its fact-check could end up deeming the website as “fake news” and make it harder to share its stories on social media sites. The Bee may be the first Christian satirical piece that Snopes has examined, but it’s hardly the first satirical site that organization has fact-checked. That’s partially because humorous fake news can get anyone, says Bob Darden, the former editor of the late Christian satire magazine, The Wittenburg Door.“ On the cover, we had a statement that said, ‘The world's pretty much only religious humor and satire magazine,’” said Darden, explaining The Door’s method for trying to prevent people from taking its articles too seriously. “That was our tip to anyone who read The Door. When articles or things got picked up by various outlets, we always insisted that we had that little tagline.” Darden joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss what makes satire Christian, how politics changes humor, and why the best parodies make it clear that the subjects are also things the writer loves. What is “ Quick to Listen”? Read more

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Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Lindor This episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you in part by Fearfully and Wonderfully: The Marvel of Bearing God's Image, a newly updated and combined book by Paul Brand and Philip Yancey, from InterVarsity Press. For 40% off and free US shipping on this book and any other IVP title, visit ivpress.com and use promo code POD19.

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Two weeks ago, the Assemblies of God General Council elected a woman to its executive leadership. After more than 100 years in existence, Ohio minister Donna Barrett now holds the role of Assemblies of God general secretary, the third-highest position in the denomination. In May, the Foursquare Church’s Tammy Dunahoo ran unsuccessfully for the denomination’s presidency. If Dunahoo would have been elected, she would have been the first female president since the denomination’s founder, Aimee Semple McPherson. Though women have largely been absent from denominational leadership structures, that women have been allowed to preach from the beginning of the movement makes them unique among Protestant traditions.Historically, Pentecostals “didn’t prefer the traditional method of leadership identification,” said Leah Payne, the author of Gender and Pentecostal Revivalism: Making a Female Ministry in the Early Twentieth Century. “They did, in fact, reject things like seminary.” People preferred calling because it existed outside of these types of structures and institutions.“Plus you could be five years old and receive a calling,” said Payne. Payne joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss why women have struggled to advance past the pastorate, the unique ways Pentecostals understand church leadership, and why many Pentecostal churches have pastor couples that lead churches together. What is “ Quick to Listen”? Read more

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This episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you in part by Fearfully and Wonderfully: The Marvel of Bearing God's Image, a newly updated and combined book by Paul Brand and Philip Yancey, from InterVarsity Press. For 40% off and free US shipping on this book and any other IVP title, visit ivpress.com and use promo code POD19. This episode of Quick to Listen  is also brought to you by Focus on the Family’s " Bring Your Bible to School Day" powered by students nationwide October 3. When you sign up to participate, you’ll also be entered to win a trip to the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last week, three more high-profile mass shootings rocked the US, once again sparking intense debate about gun control, white supremacy, and the president’s role in inspiring the shootings. In the wake of these attacks, the media also profiled the alleged gunmen, who were dubbed “loners” by those who knew them. They were also all young—the three alleged gunmen’s ages fell between 19 and 24. An LA Times op-ed by researchers who have analyzed data about the profile of mass shooters since 1966 also noted that nearly all of them were traumatized as children. The American church’s youth ministry model hasn’t done a good job of reaching this demographic, largely because of the middle-class’s desire for safety, said Andrew Root, the author of multiple books on youth ministry and a professor of youth and family ministry at Lutheran Seminary.“So all of a sudden, a loner kid comes, who either is bullying or has been bullied, and then comes in and is just a negative presence,” he said. “It can lead young people to say they don't feel safe and lead parents to be very clear to the youth worker that they don't want that kid around because he/she feels unsafe. I think it becomes really difficult that American youth ministry as it classically has been a middle-class phenomenon and that tends to push these young people out. Or not even out, but they just disappear.” Root joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss the complexities of welcoming disaffected young people into church, why lack of interpersonal relationships especially hurts young people, and what Bonhoeffer has to offer our current conversation on youth ministry. Note: the date that marked the beginning of the data set in the research published by the LA Times was incorrectly stated on the podcast. It is correct in the show notes and here: 1966. This episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you in part by Things Above Podcast: Heavenly Thinking for Earthly Engagement. This episode of Quick to Listen is also brought to you by Focus on the Family’s Bring Your Bible to School Day powered by students nationwide October 3rd. When you sign up to participate, you’ll also be entered to win a trip to the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C..  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Two weeks ago, Josh Harris, the author of the controversial Christian bestseller I Kissed Dating Goodbye, announced that he and his wife, Shannon, were ending their marriage. Last week, Harris published another Instagram post, this time about the state of his faith:I have undergone a massive shift in regard to my faith in Jesus. The popular phrase for this is “deconstruction,” the biblical phrase is “falling away.” By all the measurements that I have for defining a Christian, I am not a Christian. Many people tell me that there is a different way to practice faith and I want to remain open to this, but I’m not there now.Harris’s announcement caught editor Drew Dyck off guard.“I think my shock probably pales in comparison to the shock and even the grief that the people that sat under his ministry for over a decade would feel,” said Dyck, the author of Generation Ex-Christian: Why Young Adults Are Leaving the Church … and how to Bring Them Back. “There's a lot of consternation when your pastor says he's ‘falling away’ from faith because it's an implicit threat to your own faith.”Dyck joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and CT Pastors editor Kyle Rohane to discuss why people are leaving the church today, why you should react differently to your friend departing the faith than your child, and how to process our emotions and reactions we learn that public figures and loved ones have left Christianity. This episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you in part by Promise Keepers. The Christian men’s ministry that filled stadiums across America is, once again, calling on men to stand up and be counted. For more information, go to promisekeepers.org. Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our host on Twitter: Morgan Lee Follow our guest on Twitter: Drew Dyck Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last week, the US hosted its second religious freedom ministerial, an event which calls attention to the plight of those suffering persecution for their faith (or lack thereof), around the world. The same week, Politico reported that some in the Trump administration were advocating to slash the refugee program to zero next year. In light of the significant cuts to the program that the administration has already made, CT asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was organizing the ministerial, to respond to arguments that the refugee program had closed off “one of the avenues that people of minority faiths have to escape their persecution.” His response: This administration appropriately is incredibly proud of how we treat those who are at risk around the world. I think there’s no nation in history that has accepted as many refugees as the United States has, nor whom has an even broader acceptance of people coming from around the world—both to come here to study and to learn, but those who want to come here permanently as well. Our focus here at the State Department has been to do our level best to do what we believe these people actually want: to help them stay inside of their own country, to deliver them goods and services and benefits, and to help shape their government policies in ways that permit them not to have to flee the country but allow them to exist safely and securely inside of their own country. Now on staff at World Relief Dupage/Aurora, Durmomo Gary came to the United States over a decade ago. He left Sudan in the early 2000s after an attempt on his life because of his Christian faith and recently wrote about his experiences for the Daily Herald. "We landed in New York on October 31. As an American you know what day that is,” he said. “We landed in the airport and all I can see around is creepy costumes. Never read about it. Never heard about it. It freaked me out.” Gary and his wife survived the bizarre cultural experience to make their transfer to Chicago and begin the US side of the refugee resettlement process. Gary joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss what happens when you find out someone’s trying to kill you, how to get a passport when people are trying to kill you, and what it’s like to be a Christian in Sudan v. America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It claims 100,000 members. It owns and operates an evangelical television channel, two schools, the first and only private prison in Korea, and hospitals in Korea and Ethiopia. Forty years ago, Myungsung Presbyterian Church in Korea was founded by Kim Sam-whan, its now pastor emeritus. But the church is currently involved in a crisis over who will be its next pastor. Kim Sam-whan gave his senior pastor position to his son in 2017. But the Presbyterian denomination to which it belongs says that it violated part of the denomination’s constitution, which prohibits the transference of pastor or elder positions to family members. According to CT’s reporting: “Defenders argue that Kim Ha-na was elected in accordance with Myungsung’s laws, and the denomination that Kim Sam-whan once headed should not meddle in the megachurch’s affairs. Critics argue that the denomination’s flagship church is flouting the corporate laws it must heed.” Because the first wave of megachurches started in South Korea, church leaders in that country have been thinking about the proper procedures for succession for several years now, says Warren Bird, the vice president of research and equipping for the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability. But this issue is something that churches have been wrestling with for years. “Nepotism came from a church context, nephew-ism. It was where certain priests had certain sons and certain nephews that they wanted to position well in the responsibilities and hierarchies of the church,” he said. “Of course the question was: Did they really father the child?” Bird joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss how the Bible handles succession, how it affected the church’s rules about celibacy, and when women are bequeathed the ministry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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What this sometimes contentious rite looks like in global Christianity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last week, CT published a piece about the “First Century Mark Saga.” It’s a complicated, nearly decade-old situation that reveals much about the world of ancient biblical manuscripts. Many Christians may be inclined to primarily connect biblical manuscripts with apologetics or Bible translations, but the ecosystem they inhabit is far more complex, says Christian Askeland, a former Museum of the Bible employee and professor of Christian origins. “With the Gospel of Mark controversy, there's a lot of stuff going on there,” said Askeland. “There is the paleography issue—the New Testament was written in the first century, so just the basic idea that we could have a first century manuscript, that one of those would survive and we would have it. Then there’s the issue of acquiring the artifact—what museums have the right to buy this kind of ancient material culture. And then there's the scholarly issue—how do professionals, specifically Christian scholars look when they are trying to buy this manuscript.” Askeland joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli this week on Quick to Listen to discuss what’s at stake in the ‘First-Century Mark’ saga and illuminate the larger world of ancient biblical manuscripts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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China is home to some of the worst religious repression in the world. But it also prints more Bibles than any country, thanks to the Nanjing-based Amity Press, which has printed almost 200 million Bibles since 1988 in partnership with the United Bible Societies. So when the Trump administration recently announced that the latest round of tariffs would include books, Christian publishers were alarmed. Last week, several leaders in the industry made their case before trade representatives to exempt Bibles from these proposed economic measures. But how did an industry that just decades ago was operating like a family business become a global one? And what makes China uniquely capable of printing millions of Bibles and other Christian books? Stan Jantz, the executive director of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss how globalization transformed the Christian publishing industry, why China is such a crucial place for Christian publishing, and why he hopes his testimony can help the book industry overall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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How God is working through the Windrush generation and beyond. The number of churches continues to drop in the UK. As CT reported last month, there are only 39,000 congregations left in the country, a quarter drop from 20 years ago. But despite churches increasingly closing their doors and the number of people attending church falling, this bad news isn’t across the board. For Black Majority Churches, the numbers actually look a lot healthier. These congregations began in the wake of World War II, when immigrants began arriving in the UK from the Caribbean, sparking a generation that became known as the Windrush generation, named after the boat that the inaugural group took. “They came over to help the UK,” said Chine McDonald, the media, content, and PR lead at Christian Aid. McDonald’s family came over from Nigeria several decades later, though they didn’t always face a warm welcome from the local congregations. “I remember when we would go to predominantly white churches. We would arrive on a Sunday and were told, ‘What made you choose this church as opposed to a black church that was down the road?’” said McDonald. “...These white majority churches weren’t used to see black people in their congregations, weren’t used to having black friends or black neighbors.” Nigeria is actually responsible for one of the country’s most robust denominations, the Redeemed Christian Church of God, which has more than 800 churches in the UK. McDonald joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the growth of African and West Indian Christianity and how it is changing the UK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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In August 2010, CT published a cover story on Beth Moore, “Why Women Want Moore: Homespun, savvy, and with a relentless focus on Jesus, Beth Moore has become the most popular Bible teacher in America.” Intensely popular among evangelical women when the story was published nearly a decade ago, Moore, a Southern Baptist, has increasingly drawn the attention of American Christians at large. More recently, Moore has also begun speaking out on politics, sexual abuse, and the misogyny that she has experienced in the church. Her preferred platform has been Twitter, where she has nearly a million followers. Earlier this year, she tweeted that in 2016, for the first time, she was able to confront the abuses and misuses of power she had seen and experienced in the Southern Baptist denomination. Earlier this month she also provoked another controversy with some Southern Baptist leaders when discussing how she would be preaching at an upcoming church. Yet her influence shows no sign of waning. “I think a lot of evangelical women look to her for shaping their theological views, for understanding how to study the Bible, but then also just in general,” said Sarah Pulliam Bailey, a religion reporter for the Washington Post who wrote the Moore cover story. “She's funny and she's charismatic and quick. … She doesn't have just Southern Baptist fans; it stretches far beyond that. And if she were to somehow shift in her views, it would be a big deal. So I think she has a big voice [among Southern Baptists], but she's not just dependent on the Southern Baptist Convention.” Pulliam Bailey joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss how Beth Moore came to hold this platform, when she began to speak out on more controversial topics, and what this means for communities she’s part of. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Popular Southern Baptist pastor David Platt learned that President Donald Trump was on the way to his church in the middle of the service, as he prepared to take communion. When the president arrived, Platt put his arm around Trump and prayed: “We pray that he would look to you; that he would trust in you; that he would lean on you; that he would govern and make decisions in ways that are good for justice, good for righteousness, good for equity, every good path. Lord, we pray that you would give him all the grace he needs to govern in ways that we just saw in 1 Timothy 2 that lead to peaceful and quiet lives, godly and dignified in every way.” Last year, Vice President Mike Pence visited Metropolitan Baptist Church several days after Trump reportedly referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries.” At the service, Maurice Watson, the senior pastor of Metropolitan Baptist Church, pushed back on that characterization. "I stand today as your pastor to vehemently denounce and reject such characterizations of the nation’s (inaudible) and of our brothers and sisters in Haiti and I further say whoever made such a statement and whoever used such a visceral and disrespectful, dehumanizing adjective to characterize the nations of Africa,” Watson said. “Do you hear me, church? Whoever said it is wrong and they ought to be held accountable.” Watson’s actions came out of Paul’s exhortation in Ephesians 4 to speak the truth in love. “It literally means truthing in love, and sometimes truthing in love means that one has to do as Pastor Platt did, and that is to pray for someone even if that person is someone with whom one disagrees,” said Watson. “But also truthing in love is what I believe I did, to speak in a very measured, in a very respectful way, to say if someone made those remarks about these people groups, whoever that person may be, is wrong.” Watson joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and managing editor Andy Olsen discuss what it’s like to have the executive branch show up in your congregation, the challenges of pastoring in DC, and what happens after you push back against the Trump administration while the VP is in the house. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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In April, nine Hong Kong activists were convicted for participating in the pro-democracy Occupy Central and Umbrella Movement protests. One of those was a Baptist pastor, Chu Yiu-Ming. In the courtroom, he painted a vivid picture of the faith that had transformed his life and inspired his activism: “We have no regrets. We hold no grudges, no anger, no grievances. We do not give up,” he said, speaking on behalf of fellow activists striving to bring universal voting rights to Hong Kong. “In the words of Jesus, ‘Happy are those who are persecuted because they do what God requires; The Kingdom of heaven belongs to them!’” (Matt. 5:10) Our coverage of Chu’s sermon was one of CT’s most popular news stories of the year so far, with many on social media praising his bravery. Chu was not the only leader known for his faith. Earlier this month, Joshua Wong, a 22-year-old Hong Kong pro-democracy activist, was returned to prison. Earlier he told World Magazine: As Christians, we are not only responsible for preaching the gospel and then waiting to go to heaven when we die. We need to be bringing heaven down to earth. That seems like a totally idealistic dream, but if we want that dream to come true, how should we let people know that as Christians we don’t focus only on trying to increase our salaries and better our careers? We ask, how can we do more for the people around us?” The Umbrella Movement and Occupy Central Protests have not been welcomed by all Christians. Several years ago, Archbishop Paul Kwong at the Anglican St. John’s Cathedral angered many Hong Kong Christians after saying that pro-democracy activists should remain silent, as Jesus did while being crucified more than 2,000 years ago. “I would like to ask for Christians in the world to pray for Hong Kong—especially for Hong Kong church and Christians—for hearts of love and peace, because I think in the division, we have a lot of hatred and anger in ourselves,” said Wai Luen “Andrew” Kwok, associate professor in the department of religion and philosophy at Hong Kong Baptist University. This week on Quick to Listen we’ll explore what’s at stake in the Umbrella Movement, how Christians have influenced it, but also why it’s divided the church. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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On Thursday, Indians will learn the results of their country’s massive national elections. For the past five years, the country has been governed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Despite Modi’s popularity among much of the country’s Hindu population, his tenure in office has proved difficult for India’s religious minorities. The Hindutva movement—which is made up of extremists who believe that all Indians must be Hindu—have gone after Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, and other religious minorities. “Christians in India are not the only ones facing the brunt of nationalism,” Vijayesh Lal, the general secretary of the Evangelical Fellowship of India. “We know about Muslims being lynched. … That would also be the Communists, who actually subscribe to no religion at all. That would also be the Dalits, or the untouchables.” Since 2014, India has risen 11 spots on Open Doors’ World Watch List, and last year the advocacy group said that more than 12,000 Christians were attacked. Lal joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and theology editor Caleb Lindgren to discuss why he is not optimistic about the election results, regardless of the victor, why the government denies Christians and Muslims affirmative action, and why conversion is complicated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last week, the Canadian Catholic leader Jean Vanier died at the age of 90. Born into a privileged family, Vanier’s life took an unexpected turn when he founded L’Arche, an international network of communities for people with and without intellectual and developmental disabilities. As Bethany McKinney Fox, the founding pastor of a church inspired by L’Arche wrote for CT: “While many ministries involving people with intellectual disabilities began with a clear separation between those being helped and those doing the helping, slowly the paradigm has shifted toward Vanier’s approach at L’Arche, where all are called to share their gifts as members of one body of Christ, doing the work of the gospel together.” In addition to his legacy of work with intentional communities, Vanier was also a prolific author. “The themes that constitute those books—peace, peacemaking, community, community building, communion—are pretty consistent,” said Michael Higgins, the author of Jean Vanier: Logician of the Heart. “They undergo various kind of elaborations if you like, various more sophisticated iterations, but they are fundamentally the same themes built on the radical simplicity of the gospel that calls for us to live lives for others.” Higgins joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the counterculturally private personal life of Jean Vanier, his relationship with Henri Nouwen, and what evangelicals should learn from this deeply Catholic intellectual and practioner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This week marked the start of Ramadan, a 30-day season of fasting and celebrating observed by millions of Muslims around the world. Some Christian communities, especially in the Middle East, have for generations learned how to respect and connect with their Muslim neighbors during this time. As more Americans convert to Islam and Muslims from other countries migrate to Europe and North America, the Western church has been slowly learning the history of this holiday and how to reach the mosque during this time. Fasting is a great way for Christians to connect with Muslims during Ramadan, says Joseph Cumming, who works with Muslim, Christian and Jewish leaders and scholars around the world to promote mutual understanding and reconciliation. “Maybe you just fast one day in Ramadan to enter into that experience with them and what you find is when you do that and then you have a conversation with your Muslim friend and suddenly there's this feeling of we are in this together instead of this, ‘I'm in one community and you're in a different community and never the twain shall meet,’” said Cumming. “Actually, we're part of a single group of people having this experience together, and it can lead to beautiful spiritual conversations.” Cumming joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss Christians’ complicated relationship with fasting, the origins and meaning of the season of Ramadan, and things Christians should be especially sensitive to during Ramadan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Two weeks ago, the Notre Dame caught fire and burned. In the aftermath of the blaze, fundraising efforts to repair and reopen the church have raised millions of dollars. But they’ve also highlighted disparities in the ability of other religious traditions—primarily Protestants and Muslims—to open new places of worship and maintain their existing ones. Currently, a new church opens every 10 days in France, says Raphaël Anzenberger, the director of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries for the French-speaking world. But expensive rents often mean that these churches can’t move to the city center, and consequently have a harder time influencing their culture’s leaders. Existing congregations seeking to renovate their buildings also run into challenges. “It's getting really complicated for our pastors, who not only need to feed the flock, which is their first calling, but also to be experts in handicapped law [and how to] fireproof buildings. You have to be a lawyer, a notary, it's just crazy, an architect,” said Anzenberger. And the government isn’t necessarily a friend. “Sometimes what they'll say is, ‘We really like you. We think we understand who you are. We think we understand you're not a cult,’ which is already a good progress, but then they'll say, ‘You know, if we help you then we'll need to help all the other ones.’ And the other ones is basically the Muslims.” Anzenberger joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss why the relationship between church and state in France is so terrible, why the fashion industry needs more evangelists, and what’s behind a recent spate of vandalism in French churches. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Nearly 300 people are dead after suicide bombers attacked three churches and three high-end hotels on Easter Sunday this week. Christians—the majority of whom are Catholics—make up less than 10 percent of the population of the majority-Buddhist nation, and have reported escalating concerns about their religious freedom. Christian persecution has largely come at the hands of Buddhist radicals, so the church has largely responded to the attacks with shock, says Ivor Poobalan, the Prinicipal of Colombo Theological seminary in Kohuwala (Colombo), Sri Lanka. “We expected the threat or danger to come from those quarters,” said Poobalan. “Islam has been around for over 1,000 years and has never been violent.” Poobalan joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and theology editor Caleb Lindgren to discuss how Christianity arrived in Sri Lanka, why the faith has long been associated with privilege, and how he hopes the church will respond to the bombings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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everal weeks ago, theologian Ekemini Uwan was interviewed on stage at the Sparrow Conference for Women. But when Uwan, a Nigerian American who frequently speaks out against racism and white supremacy, began doing so at the conference, people in the audience began walking out, according to a report from The Witness. Uwan later tweeted that she had to hire an attorney to force the conference to send her photos and video of her interview. YouTube also removed a video of her remarks at the request of Sparrow, and the conference’s social media did not include her images or quotes, in contrast to those of other speakers. Earlier this year, author Kathy Khang preached at chapel at Baylor University. Khang, a veteran speaker, included an anecdote mentioning an 11-year-old boy who was arrested after not standing during the Pledge of Allegiance. In the middle of Khang’s talk, a Baylor student stood up and said, “That’s not what happened. He was making terroristic threats to his teacher.” The event deeply rattled Khang, both for her personal safety in the moment and also when the same student who attended the event posted a video slamming her. It’s important that the conference organizers who invite women of color to speak—especially when the speakers are delivering a message that may challenge the audience—ensure the audience is prepared to hear their message, says Khang. “If you’re asking me to talk about the church, what are the ways you’ve already prepared your audience to hear this message?” said Khang. “What are the books you’ve had them read? Who are the other speakers who have come in? What is the reception like for them? What is the follow-up you have planned for the event you’re inviting me to?” When attendees find themselves uncomfortable by the remarks of a particular speaker, that can be a good time for their own personal reflection, says author Natasha Sistrunk Robinson, who also frequently teaches at Christian conferences. “We don’t always have to agree, but what is going on here? What are the blind spots?” said Sistrunk Robinson. “Have you been stretched and challenged by this in a good way?” Sistrunk Robinson and Khang joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and theology editor Caleb Lindgren on Quick to Listen, to discuss how Christian conferences and institutions can do a better job supporting the women of color that they invite to address their audiences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that Texas could not execute inmate Patrick Murphy if they did not allow his Buddhist chaplain into the death chamber with him. In response, last Thursday, the state of Texas decided to ban all chaplains from entering the death chamber with inmates. Patrick Murphy’s situation echoes the story of Alabama inmate Domineque Ray. Ray, who was executed in February, requested to have his imam be present with him in the execution chamber. Ultimately, his request was denied and Ray was put to death without the presence of his chaplain. Chaplains serve many roles in the final moments of an inmate's life, including comforting family members, says Earl Smith, who served for decades as a death row chaplain in San Quentin State Prison in California. When they’re kept from inmates in their final moments, it can mean there’s no one who is able to relay the individual’s last words. “That inmate was looking for a way to say ‘bye’ in peace and because you said ‘No, you can’t have [the chaplain],’ even in his death, there was no peace,” said Smith. “We often say that when they’re executed there’s going to be closure. Executions don’t bring closure. They just mean someone has died.” Smith joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and theology editor Caleb Lindgren to discuss why Christians should want all death row inmates to be able to be with their chosen chaplain when they die, what it’s like to spiritually walk with prisoners, and the surprising circumstances that led to Smith winding up at San Quentin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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At the beginning of this year, Christianity Today received a grant funding a position for an immigrant communities’ editor. What beat is that, you say? It’s a position that examines “the intersection of immigration, the church, and Christian communities.” As immigration continues to be a volatile current event, we wanted to hire someone who could examine the complex issue from a human and faith-perspective. Enter Bekah McNeel, a longtime education journalist based in San Antonio, Texas. Living and reporting for a number of years on a border state has changed how McNeel understands the immigrant issues—and how she perceives the national news coverage that will suddenly show up and attempt to cover a story without “a deep understanding of the context.” “The coverage was always really jarring,” she said. “You don't understand how normal it is for people to come and go [across the border.] The thought that a truck full of 18 guys could get as far as San Antonio it seems like what?.... The whole thing seems bigger and scarier because you didn't have a context.” McNeel joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to talk about why the immigration issues need less policy discussion, speeches, and sermons and more conversations, how emotions are and are not different on the border, and why she’s excited about this position this year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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In 2013, Christian book retailer, Cokesbury Bookstores, closed all 38 retail stores. In 2017, Family Christian Resources shut down all 240 locations in the midst of mounting debt and bankruptcy. Then, this year, LifeWay Christian Resources, the largest Christian retail chain in America, announced that it would be closing all of its 170 stores this year. While Christian book publishers have sold their products on Amazon for years, these closures still affect their business, says Mark Taylor, the president and CEO of Tyndale House Publishers. “In some ways, Amazon has been a boon to publishers of all types because they are now our largest trading partner and have been for a number of years,” said Taylor. “The key issue that we talk about at Tyndale House is what we call ‘discoverability.’ How will a consumer the new books or the old books that we are publishing?” Taylor recounted a recent trip to Barnes and Noble, where, after browsing through the offerings, he found a book by a longtime Tyndale author Jerry B. Jenkins. “I ‘discovered’ it by seeing it in Barnes and Noble,” said Taylor. “We’ve all had the experience that Amazon is a great place to shop for anything … and their customer service is outstanding. But how do you discover new books?” Taylor joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the golden years of Christian publishing, how publishers have adjusted their selling strategies as brick-and-mortar stores have vanished, and just how significant the Amazon effect is. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Christianity Today’s March 2019 cover story examined how retirement fits into the Christian vision of faith and work and how assumptions about what retirement looks like are changing for many Americans. We looked at the increasingly diverse ways that Christians are leveraging their post-career years for the good of their families, churches, and communities. A lot of readers wrote in to express appreciation for covering a topic that really matters to so many, but we also got a fair number of responses that were concerned that our take on retirement was too narrow. One reader, Rodney, summed it up this way: "Your article 'Saving Retirement' in the March issue was a good summary of the situation facing retirees today. However, most of the examples of retirees doing something purposeful after retirement were people who had held leading positions in their field of work with presumably large salaries. The article definitely needed to portray what some ‘ordinary workers’ have gone on to do." We agreed with Rodney that there is a much broader picture of post-work life that needs to be acknowledged. Do Christian understandings of work and aging accommodate those who can’t afford to retire? Rev. Amy Ziettlow, pastor of Holy Cross Lutheran Church in Decatur, Illinois, and author, with Naomi Cahn, of Homeward Bound: Modern Families, Elder Care, and Loss, joined theology editor Caleb Lindgren and editor in chief Mark Galli to talk about the hopeful vision for retirement she sees in her working-class church community and her recommendations for how retirement-aged individuals and their churches can best partner with each other during the autumn years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Venezuela has been in crisis for years, but the situation there has arguably taken an even greater turn for the worse in recent weeks. Recently, a blackout cut off the entire country from electricity. Citizens have also been victim to frequent water shortages and a currency that is losing its value at unprecedented rates. At the same time, more than three million people have left the country of 31 million people, roughly 10 percent of the population. The country is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, although, like much of Latin America, has experienced the growing influence of Protestantism. According to Pew Research Center’s 2014 numbers, Protestants currently make up 17 percent of the population. Germán Novelli-Oliveros, the Venezuelan-born-and-raised pastor of Grace Lutheran Church in Milwaukee, joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss how oil brought Protestantism to Venezuela, why pastors won’t speak out politically, and his advice for people who want to help. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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As part of the launch of her latest book, Shameless: A Sexual Reformation, Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber asked would-be readers to mail her their purity rings. Then she took the submissions and had them melted down and turned into a vagina statue. While the action earned attention for its shock value, Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren recently pointed out for CT that this was far from the first example of vaginal (or yonic) art in the Christian tradition. “No reasonable person could say that these Christian yonic symbols indicate that the early church was a bastion of feminist liberation,” Harrison Warren wrote. “In the ancient church, as now, misogyny abounds. Still, at the very least, they show that the female body was not (and is not) deemed dirty, unholy, or otherwise bad.” Christian art has always depicted women, says Robin Jensen, a professor at Notre Dame who specializes in the history of Christianity and liturgical studies. “Surprisingly, though, what you’d expect to find in Christian art is sometimes not there in the initial stages,” said Jensen, the author of Understanding Early Christian Art. “If you were to think about the two most common themes in Christian art from all the centuries of Christian art through and time, you might say the crucifix and the Madonna and child. Neither of those are going to be appearing until much later.” Instead, art based on Bible stories with male and female characters from both the Old and New Testament is what is initially most prevalent, says Jensen. Jensen joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and theology editor Caleb Lindgren to discuss the extent to which fertility is a theme in Christian art, how nudity is generally handled in Christian art, and what’s going on with angels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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For the past four days, the General Conference of the United Methodist Church has been reexamining its doctrines on human sexuality. From Christianity Today’s report from yesterday: The United Methodist Church (UMC) voted Tuesday to maintain its traditional stance against same-sex marriage and non-celibate gay clergy, bolstered by a growing conservative contingent from Africa. The denomination’s “Traditional Plan” passed, with 438 votes in favor and 384 against (53% to 47%), in the final hours of a special UMC conference held this week in St. Louis to address the issue of human sexuality. While this decision will likely have broad global consequences, it is also one that has been heavily impacted by the denomination’s large international presence. The UMC has about 7 million lay members in the US and 5.5 million overseas, and they operate in more than 130 countries. But the denomination's broad reach isn’t anything new. “It’s inherently a global movement,” said J. Steven O’Malley, a professor of Methodist Holiness history at Asbury Theological Seminary, who recently spent the year working on a project called “The Origin of the Wesleyan Theological Vision for Christian Globalization and the Pursuit of Pentecost in Early Pietist Revivalism.” O’Malley joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss what was at stake at the most recent UMC meeting, how the denomination came together 50 years ago, and how it ended up around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Introducing: The Way to Glory by Christianity Today Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Note: Quick to Listen now has transcripts! Scroll to the bottom of the episode description to read through our conversation with David Bailey. Last week, the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News published a three-part investigation into the scope of sex abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention. Among one of the seeming fruits of their report was an announcement from the head of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Al Mohler wanted to apologize for the role that he played in protecting his friend CJ Mahaney after he was accused of covering up a sex abuse scandal at his church. In an 850-word statement, Mohler acknowledged his role in supporting Mahaney, even as questions arose about his involvement. He then expressed regret for his former actions and spoke specifically about where he believed he had fallen short. “I can only speak for myself, but I wish to do so clearly, acknowledging these errors, grieving at the harm that was done, and committing to do everything I can to lead well and to serve Christ faithfully.” Like many public apologies today, Mohler’s drew a mixed reaction. Some were frustrated about the length of time it took for him to acknowledge his mistakes. Others were encouraged by the change of heart from a man who it had seemed might never change his mind. “With our leaders, any kind of leadership, people want to know, if something’s wrong, do you see it and are you going to do something about it? Are you going to do the right thing?” said David Bailey, the executive director of Arrabaon, a ministry that helps Christian leaders engage in in reconciliation. “Leadership, a lot of times, is moving on the currency of trust. I think a demand for an apology is ‘Hey, can I trust you? Are you going to do the right thing?’” Bailey joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss why it’s hard to offer a good public apology, why it’s significant that we “demand an apology,” and how long is long enough before the start of a “comeback” story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Half of millennial Christians say it’s wrong to evangelize. This was the headline from CT’s report from new Barna Group research examining the perspectives of millennials, Gen-X, boomer, and elder practicing Christians on sharing their faith. (Note: Barna defines “practicing Christians” as churchgoers who consider religion an important part of their lives.) More than 90 percent of practicing Christians of all generations agreed somewhat or strongly that “part of my faith means being a witness about Jesus” and “the best thing that could ever happen to someone is for them to come to know Jesus.” Millennials were more likely than any other age group to say that they were gifted at sharing their faith with other people. In fact, 73 percent said they were compared to 56 percent of elders, who were the least secure about their ability. But controversially—at least to CT’s Twitter followers—47 percent of millennials said it was wrong to share one’s personal beliefs with someone of a different faith in hopes that they will one day share the same faith. What should we make of these numbers? Alpha USA executive director Craig Springer joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss what these figures really mean, why the best way to do evangelism may just be asking questions, and why Christian unity is a good form of Christian witness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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For nearly 100 days, more than 500 Dutch pastors—as well as some from across the continent and the Atlantic—across denominations gathered in Bethel Church for a continuous worship service. Why? To protect a refugee family from deportation. From CT’s report: The Dutch government is generally prohibited from interrupting religious services, so the Protestant congregation kept extending their gathering during the debate over family asylum or kinderpardon. [Last week,] officials agreed to allow the Armenian family at Bethel—along with 700 others who have lived in the country for more than a decade—to have their cases reviewed again rather than face immediate expulsion. Christian leader Axel Wicke was closely involved with the planning and execution of the hundreds of hours–long service. Some of Wicke’s elderly church attendees told him that they stopped by the service in the middle of the night when they woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep. “I’m now quite familiar with who of my parish members are night people,” he said. Wicke found the experience transformative for his own spiritual life but also said it offered a profound picture of Christianity for people with little knowledge of the religion. “The reason why we did this was quite sad or depressing … but it was also a really big gift to this parish and to the church in the Hague,” said Wicke. “I still get messages along the line, ‘Finally, I know why there is a church.’ It was a very fundamental way of recognizing, ‘That’s what the church is for.’” Wicke joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss how the past couple months changed his views on prayer, how to figure out the logistics of a continuous 24/7 church service, and what type of impact this might have on the Christian community in the Netherlands long-term. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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SIS has claimed responsibility for an attack that killed 20 churchgoers and soldiers at a Catholic church in the Philippines. Two bombs exploded at a church in the city of Jolo on Sunday, “the first blasting through rows of pews and the second shooting from the entrance to kill scrambling parishioners as well as the guards positioned outside to protect the church week after week,” according to CT’s report. The attack came several days after a key vote in the region’s surrounding islands on a referendum that offered the area greater autonomy. While Muslims in Jolo largely opposed the referendum—part of an effort to end ongoing clashes between Philippine forces and separatists, —it passed anyway. Given that the vote seemingly went in their favor, why did extremists react violently? “What they want to do is pit Muslims and Christians against each other,” said Efraim Tendero, the current general secretary of the World Evangelical Alliance and former national director of the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches. When he previously visited Jolo, Tendero said he had been welcomed at the airport by one of the region’s Muslim leaders. “You can see that the moderate Muslim community is peace-loving and would like to support peace,” he said. These attacks, then, likely come from a group that doesn’t “really want the peace agreement to flourish so they are trying to sow more terror,” said Tendero, pointing out that many of the casualties were soldiers guarding the area. Tendero joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the relationship between Christians and Muslims in Asia’s most Christian country and the health of the Filipino church in the 21st century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Videos from last Friday’s March for Life and the Indigenous People’s March have been the subject of intense debate. In footage from a clip filmed in front of the Lincoln Memorial on Friday, high school students, some wearing Make America Great Again hats, appeared to be in a faceoff with a Native American elder. The footage went viral, as many on social media condemned the boys’ apparent actions. Shortly thereafter, a new video showed a group of half a dozen Hebrew Israelites berating and using insults that seem to come out of the Old Testament to the same high schoolers and the Native Americans at the event for more than an hour. For many Americans, this was their first encounter with this sect, started by two African Americans in the late 19th century. Despite the scripture references that many members of the community drop in public, Christians should avoid engaging the Hebrew Israelites should they encounter them on the street, says Lisa Fields, the founder and president of Jude 3 Project, an apologetics ministry focused on serving the black community. “You’re not usually going to get any headway because they’re going to be very insulting, very loud and no matter what scripture you present they’re going to counter it with something else,” said Fields. “…I find the most effective way to engage is 1-1. In a crowd of people, even if you are making some headway or one person is listening to you, the group is going to feed them so they’re not going to show that you’re breaking through at any point. Fields joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and theology editor Caleb Lindgren to talk about where the Hebrew Israelite movement came from, how the black church has responded, and what majority culture Christians need to know about what causes these movements to grow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Note: Our guest on this week’s show signed his responses so we are also making a video of this podcast available here: youtube.com/watch?v=zgbTsGnQOdQ&t=2651s Donations from the 40,000 attendees at this year’s Passion Conference raised nearly half a million dollars to fund Bible translations for the deaf. These funds will boost projects in Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, Moldova, Egypt, Ghana, South Africa, Tanzania, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Japan, and Russia. No sign language has a full Bible translation, and just 2 percent of deaf people around the world have access to the Gospels in their sign languages. According to CT’s reporting: Sign languages aren’t structured like text-based or spoken languages [and] they require their own processes for passages of Scripture to be told visually through sign. Chronological Bible Translation (CBT) translates the Bible by stories, while Book-by-Book (BBB) translation uses the chapter and verse structure, the Deaf Bible Society explained. The deaf community is made up of visual learners, says Jason Suhr, the director of Scripture Engagement & Translation at the Deaf Bible Society. “We don’t rely on specific words,” said Suhr, through translator William Ross III. “We kind of rely more on images and the context of those images.” When someone is signing, they will first set the scene, often spelling out the weather and where objects, plants, trees, or people might be. “You don’t really get a lot of that in English,” said Suhr. “You have to create that image in your head, whereas deaf people are able to set that up.” Suhr joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to to explore why it’s taken such a long time to provide this community with a translation of the Bible and what it will take to transform this situation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last fall, the Patriarch of Moscow cut ties with the Patriarch of Constantinople. This action severed the world’s largest Orthodox church from its historic home and launched a series of events that recently took a sharp turn. Last week, the Patriarch of Constantinople offered the Orthodox Church of Ukraine independence from the Patriarch of Russia, actions that weren’t greeted warmly by the Patriarch of Moscow. All of this is taking place in the context of a half-decade of conflict between Russia and Ukraine over Crimea. So is this church fissure over disagreements in doctrine or international politics? One key to understanding it is understanding the concept of symphonia, or the Orthodox perspective of church-state relations. A 2016 CT article characterized symphonia as “institutionalized ‘harmonious relations’ between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian state.” “This intentional connection between church and state allows the Orthodox Church to enjoy all the attendant privileges of political preference and feeds into a uniquely Russian national identity,” wrote Andrey Shirin, in “Russia: The Other Christian Nation.” Practically, it means that the Patriarch of Moscow and Russian president Vladimir Putin work closely together, says George Hancock-Stefan, a professor at Palmer Theological Seminary and contributor to Three Views on Eastern Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism. “It behooves this unified front—Putin and the patriarch—to say, ‘What is happening in Ukraine is something we don’t like,’” said Hancock-Stefan. “Therefore Ukraine didn’t like what the patriarch was doing and thus they aligned themselves more strongly with the Patriarch of Constantinople, and as a result, now we have schism.” Hancock-Stefan joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to explore the history of the Orthodox Church, what it really means to cut ties with another church, and what autocephaly is and why it matters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We make New Year’s resolutions about money, fitness, diets, and technology. But what about personal character? And when choosing virtues to emulate, where should we start? The Bible, Aristotle, and Aquinas aren’t bad places to start, says Jay Wood, a philosophy professor at Wheaton College, who has frequently written about this topic. “What Christians have said about Aristotle is that he gives us good advice for how to flourish in a common human life,” said Wood. “Aristotle’s virtues do not, however, prepare us for the life to come. The great Christian teachers about virtue said we need to have the gifts that the Holy Spirit confers upon us in order to achieve the virtues.” Just for reference, here’s Galatians 5:22–23: “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” Wood joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the biblical basis for a virtuous life, if Aristotle’s exhortations ever clash with those of the Bible, and what it looks like to actually become a person of character. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Research shows our society's widespread isolation. What's the church's role in alleviating it? While technology, living situations, and neighborhood have all played roles in perpetuating these feelings of loneliness, arguably so have many of churches, says Ashley Hales, the author of Finding Holy in the Suburbs: Living Faithfully in the Land of Too Much. “There’s a sense that our church structures have made people more lonely,” said Hales. “People can just come as they please. If they’re really unknown, they’re not getting plugged into any smaller forms of community.” Part of it is changing cultural expectations of church, said Hales. “We want church to be this customizable religious experience, instead of saying this is the bride of Christ, it’s going to be painful to be a part of, that it’s one of the only organizations where people of every tribe, tongue, and nation are getting together amidst different socioeconomic and racial differences,” she said. “ Hales joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the structural and existential reasons for our loneliness, how to be a good neighbor, and why it’s the small patterns of our life that make a big difference when it comes to relationships. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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After years behind bars and on death row, Asia Bibi was recently acquitted of blasphemy charges by Pakistan’s Supreme Court. But although the verdict technically liberated the mother of five, many in Pakistan responded to the announcement in anger, with protests erupting in the country’s major cities. Her family is currently in hiding and seeking asylum in a Western country. Overwhelmingly Muslim, Pakistan is a challenging place for the Christian (and Ahmadiyya community.) It ranks No. 5 on the 2018 World Watch List of the 50 countries where it’s hardest to be a Christian. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom also classifies Pakistan as a Tier 1 Country of Particular Concern. It recently booted out 18 international non-governmental organizations, including the Christian nonprofit World Vision. The reality is that most of the country’s Christians are people who historically are from a lower caste system, which although officially abolished, still exists in the country, says Michael James Nazir-Ali, a former Anglican bishop in the Church of England, who was born in Pakistan. “The bulk of the Christian population comes from these people who were landless, casual labor, just as Asia Bibi is, and were discriminated against and despised by many of the wealthier people around,” said Nazir-Ali. This week on Quick to Listen we’ll talk about what it’s like to be a religious minority. Nazir-Ali joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the history of Pakistan’s Christian community, whether blasphemy laws will ever be abolished, and what role the United States plays in improving religious freedom in the country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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On Sunday, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram published a four-part series on more than 400 allegations of sexual misconduct affiliated with the independent fundamental Baptist movement. The scope of their reporting spanned nearly 1,000 churches and organizations across 40 states and Canada. The report noted: One hundred and sixty-eight church leaders were accused or convicted of committing sexual crimes against children, the investigation found. At least 45 of the alleged abusers continued in ministry after accusations came to the attention of church authorities or law enforcement. But what is the independent fundamental Baptist movement? Historically it has meant a firm belief in the “fundamental doctrines, that is to say, the essential doctrines of the Christian faith” and “an insistence that you should only extend Christian fellowship to people who profess to believe the gospel.” said Kevin Bauder, a research professor of systematic theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary and the author of a two-part volume on Baptist fundamentalism. But that’s not necessarily what people hear, Bauder acknowledges. “The term ‘fundamentalist’ has sort of been co-opted by Martin Marty’s Fundamentalism project, where he made it a sociological designation for any extreme group,” said Bauder. “None of us are really happy with that label these days, because of the connotations it carries now.” (Perhaps one way to see it could be as the inverse of historian George Marsden’s remark: “An evangelical is someone who likes Billy Graham.”) Bauder joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the history of fundamentalism, why he thinks the movement is dying, and the circumstances that led it to part ways with Billy Graham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We’re in the midst of what could be a significant transition for American pastoral salaries. A lawsuit challenging the longstanding clergy housing allowance is in the court of appeals. Last year’s tax reform bill made significant changes to the standard deduction, which could have dramatic effects for the level of giving churches have historically relied upon. As CT Pastors recently reported, “staffing costs typically account for 45 to 55 percent of a church’s budget. But with recent changes in costs, demographics, and giving in US churches, many are questioning that model.” Beyond these larger changes, churches, whether part of denominations or nondenominational, have long struggled with knowing how to fairly compensate pastors and other employees, says Brian Kluth, who currently leads the National Association of Evangelical’s Financial Health initiative, which seeks to improve the financial health of pastors and church. “There are real critical pay issues for people in church and really at all levels and all genders,” said Kluth. Kluth joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the inconsistent ways pastors are compensated, how American Christian giving (or lackthereof) affects this conversation, and the perks and breaks pastors receive and how they should be considered when determining salary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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A little over a week ago, a 26-year-missionary was killed by members of an isolated tribe on a remote island near India, Myanmar, and Thailand. As CT reported: According to news reports based on Chau’s journal entries, the Oral Roberts University graduate shouted, “My name is John, and I love you and Jesus loves you,” to Sentinelese tribesmen armed with bows and arrows. He fled to a fishing boat when they shot at him during his initial visit, with one arrow piercing his Bible. The young missionary did not survive a follow-up trip on November 17. Chau was working with All Nations, whose stated mission is “to make disciples and train leaders to ignite church planting movements among the neglected peoples of the earth.” Mary Ho, the international executive leader at All Nations, described Chau as a “very interesting young man” and “very focused.” “Since he was about 18 years old, I believe, he took a mission trip and on that mission trip he really felt a call to be a missionary,” Ho said. “Around that time he started researching all the different people groups and he came across the North Sentinelese people.” Chau really felt that “his life’s call was to take the love and goodness of Jesus Christ to the North Sentinelese,” said Ho. “Since then, every decision he has made has been to prepare himself for his life’s call.” Today on Quick to Listen, we want to learn more about John Chau, the Sentinelese, and other “neglected peoples”—and especially the challenges and perils of bringing the gospel to isolated people groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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How Christians Can Partner with Muslims on Religious Freedom by Christianity Today Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It’s been a bloody year in the Central African Republic. Two months ago, a massacre claimed the lives of dozens of people in the country after suspected Islamist rebels attacked a group of civilians. The massacre was just the latest in a wave of violence for the country of 4.5 million. At the beginning of this year, the CAR’s capital had been considered a safe haven in the war-torn country. It was the only place the government claimed control, as three-quarters of the landlocked nation is occupied by armed groups. But since the spring, the country has witnessed an upsurge of violence, notably with attacks targeting churches and church leaders in the capital city, Bangui, and Bambari, another important city in the country. Four Catholic priests were targeted, with three of them killed in separate Islamist attacks. In response to the violence from the past couple years, a militia composed primarily of Christians has also committed atrocities against Muslims. But the unrest hasn’t divided the church, says Paul Mpindi, the director of Mission French Africa; a radio ministry that focuses on evangelism, discipleship, and stewardship in French-speaking Africa. “I’m so thankful for the Catholic Church and Protestant church because they are working together,” said Mpindi. “The bishop there has been at the forefront of the peace transition, helping the government, helping the rebels, and working with the Muslims.” Mpindi joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli on Quick to Listen to discuss why violence is once again on the upswing, who really makes up the country’s “Christian militia,” and what it will take for peace to prevail in the country. This podcast is brought to you in part by Christianbook.com, a huge selection of Christian books, Bibles, gifts, music, and more. This episode of Quick to Listen is brought to you by Kingdom At Work, a movement that seeks to inspire, equip, and ignite leaders to advance God’s kingdom through their influence in the marketplace. To attend one of their workshops or learn more, visit KingdomAtWork.com. What is “Quick to Listen”? Read more Subscribe to Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts Follow the podcast on Twitter Follow our host on Twitter: Morgan Lee Follow our guest’s website: Mission French Africa Subscribe to Mark’s newsletter: The Galli Report Music by Sweeps Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee, Richard Clark, and Cray Allred Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Elections often call attention to white evangelicals whose votes and voices play a significant role in national elections. But their attitudes and values don’t necessarily represent those of evangelicals from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Case in point: Latino evangelicals. According to data from the Billy Graham Center Institute at Wheaton College and LifeWay Research, 41 percent of Hispanics with evangelical beliefs voted for Trump in 2016. What were the issues that most influenced their vote? According to the same survey, 19 percent said improving the economy, 14 percent said helping those in need, and 14 percent said a candidate’s position on immigration. “Most Latinos will tend to be socially conservative on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage but will tend to be social liberals on issues like education and immigration, so we’ve tended to be divided on how we spread the vote,” said Juan Martínez, who currently serves as professor of Hispanic studies and pastoral leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary. “This isn’t new; it just stands out more because we’re a larger percentage of the voting block. Those of us who have voted have struggled with this for years because the Democrat/Republican way that this is broken out doesn’t fit us well.” Martínez joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the history of Latino evangelicals and what unifies and divides the community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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A Chicagoland megachurch pastor has sued a Christian media personality and two former church-members-turned-potential-whistleblowers for defamation. According to Harvest Bible Chapel pastor James McDonald, former Moody Radio host Julie Roys and bloggers Ryan Mahoney and Scott Bryant published and helped publicize false and damaging financial information about the congregation. But should Christians so at odds actually be taking each other to court? In many cases, no, says Ken Sande, the founder of Peacemaker Ministries and the current president of Relational Wisdom 360. “Typically, conflict between Christians involves some foundation of sin,” said Sande. “Lawyers can dress that up in legal terms, but what it really comes down to in 99 percent of the cases is sin. Keeping one’s word. Slandering. False representation. Bitterness. Anger. Unforgiveness. Those are all spiritual issues that the church has jurisdiction over and a judge can’t touch.” Sande joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss conflict resolution—or lack thereof—when it comes to Christians, the power of seeing people confess sin to one another, and how these processes play out in a #MeToo era. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last year, Vice President Mike Pence pledged support to Christians, Yazidis, and other minorities forced out of their homelands in Iraq by ISIS. Religious freedom advocates and groups in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq cheered the news. Then, the money didn’t come. Last week, the Trump administration announced a multimillion-dollar assistance plan to bring the total funding over the past year for religious minorities in Iraq to nearly $300 million. The money will be used to rebuild communities, preserve heritage sites, secure left-behind explosives, and empower survivors to seek justice. Those charged with administering the funds have their work cut for them. “From the time of the US invasion to now, you have seen a Christian church of over a million people that has been reduced to 100,000 people,” said Mindy Belz, senior editor at World Magazine, who has visited and reported from Iraq frequently over the past two decades. When Saddam Hussein’s regime was first toppled, Christians were hopeful, says Belz. But as the US stayed on, things got worse for the community. “When the US had troops on the ground and were essentially running the government to it, we were not paying attention to the minorities—the Christians, the Yazidis, the Shabak, the Turkmen. We were not looking out for them,” said Belz, who is also the author of They Say We Are Infidels. “They did not have sufficient political representation that would look out for them, and they were getting no favors from the Iraqi government so the jihadists were targeting them with impunity.” Belz joins associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss what went wrong with last year’s plan to send money to Iraq, how ISIS changed how Christians relate to their fellow religious minorities and their Muslim neighbors, and what life is like on the ground in Iraq right now for the church. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last week, the world’s leading climate scientists released a sobering report, which claimed that there are only a dozen years to keep the Earth’s climate from increasing by 1.5 degrees Celsius. If the planet fails to do so, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned, the risk of drought, floods, extreme heat, and poverty for hundreds of millions of people will massively increase. To avoid barreling toward this future, the entire world will have to make massive changes in the way it currently consumes energy. “It’s a line in the sand and what it says to our species is that this is the moment and we must act now,” Debra Roberts, a scientist who worked on the report, told The Guardian. “This is the largest clarion bell from the science community and I hope it mobilizes people and dents the mood of complacency.” But upending the status quo is incredibly difficult work, says Peter Harris, cofounder of A Rocha, an international Christian nature organization. A former parish minister, Harris says he sees parallels between his conservation work and his life in church ministry. “I had to sit next to the bedside of a dying friend. It was good to be there. It was good for us to share the presence of God and the hope of the resurrection,” he said. “And sometimes we know when we’re potentially going to lose the conservation battle—and honestly I doubt if we will keep the temperature rise below two degrees within the next 15 years—what we have to do it out of is that the Lord will not abandon his creation. He’ll stir up his church worldwide.” Harris joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss UN report’s warnings and predictions, the human impact of climate change, and why a Christian response to this report must be rooted in a bigger vision than halting climate change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last week, Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. He was never seen again. Now, Turkish officials believe Khashoggi, a longtime critic of the country, was murdered by Saudi officials. That same week, US officials visited the Saudi Arabian capital city of Riyadh and reported that the country seemed to be loosening some of its harsh religious laws, including reforming its religious police—once tasked with enforcing shari’ah law on the streets and in homes—and has instituted new government programs to quash extremism. Last fall, the 33-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced plans last October to modernize Saudi Arabia and return the restrictive Muslim country to “what we were before: a country of moderate Islam that is open to all religions and to the world.” And while the Crown Prince, whose often known by his nickname MSB, has made real strides in advancing freedom, including letting women drive, incidents like Khashoggi’s reported death, suggest that things may be more complicated than they seem. “Critics will say that MBS’ reforms are lip service, eye candy, it’s trying to fool the West into thinking that Saudi Arabia is changing when in reality it’s still the same old, repressive, authoritarian regime it’s always been,”said Robert Nicholson, the founder and executive director of the Philos Project, a leadership community dedicated to promoting positive Christian engagement in the Middle East. “I actually think both are true. Anytime a woman can drive in a country and she couldn’t drive the day before is good news. I’m not going to be picky about how many other things are left undone,” said Nicholson. “...I also think it’s true that Saudi Arabia is nowhere near being a beacon of human rights and has a long, long way to go.” Nicholson joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss how Saudi Arabia’s relationship with Iran matters, why the few Christians in the country are likely to be migrant workers, and how Christianity first arrived in that part of the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last week, millions of Americans were caught up in the Senate’s Supreme Court hearings. There, psychologist Christine Blasey Ford testified that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually attacked her while the two were in high school. Several hours later, Kavanaugh emphatically refuted Blasey Ford’s allegations. The hearings came months after Justice Anthony Kennedy, long seen as a swing vote on the court, announced his retirement. This news prompted alarm from the pro-choice community who feared that the new balance in the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade. Despite their fears, Kavanaugh’s confirmation seemed on track until Blasey Ford’s allegations went public. Shortly after the hearing, a book excerpt from Tim Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, appeared in The New York Times. “Christians cannot pretend they can transcend politics and simply ‘preach the Gospel,’” he wrote in his latest book Prodigal Prophet: Jonah and the Mystery of God’s Mercy. “Those who avoid all political discussions and engagement are essentially casting a vote for the social status quo. … To not be political is to be political.” But that doesn’t mean that Christians have to hold convictions about every moment of political life, said Keller. One example: knowing exactly who or what to believe about Kavanaugh and Ford: “Neither you nor I are decision makers at all. We’re not being asked to make a decision. If I was in a position where I had to make a decision—I had a vote or I had to do something about it—then I would be doing everything I could to get to the bottom of things,” Keller told CT. “I’m not sure why everyone on Twitter feels like they have to come to a position. That’s actually kind of new.” Keller joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss how he follows this news, where his political convictions come from, and just how great the stakes are of politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Earlier this month, you couldn’t turn a television on without seeing footage of Hurricane Florence. As of recording, the storm has been blamed for the deaths of 42 people in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, and costing billions of dollars of damage. Yet, in many ways, national attention has already moved on. That’s something that Puerto Rico knows too well. It’s been a year since the storm claimed 64 immediate deaths and catalyzed the exodus of thousands of Puerto Ricans from the island and a sense of hopelessness in the territory at large. The loss of community was especially hard for Puerto Ricans like Gadiel Ríos, a pastor in Arecibo, who stayed on the island. “Everyone lost their friends, everyone lost family,” said Ríos, who is also the founder of the ministry ReformaDos. “The main problem we are facing now is despair and then because of their despair people tend to [fall] into depression...People feel lonely and frustrated.” Ríos joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss how the church is ministering to the overwhelmed, how Mainlanders encouraged those on the island, and the state of Puerto Rico’s evangelical community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Several years ago, the Obama administration set a target of resettling more than 110,000 refugees for resettlement in fiscal year 2017, the highest goal since 1995. This week, the Trump administration set the ceiling on the number of refugees that can be resettled in the United States next year at 30,000. Even as the number of refugees allowed in America has dropped since Trump took office, the State Department has named international religious freedom as one of its primary goals. To some extent, these two policies work against each other, says Jenny Yang, who provides oversight for all advocacy initiatives and policy positions at World Relief. “The countries from which Christians are most persecuted are those that there are the most refugees from,” said Yang. Only 18 and 5 refugees from Iraq and Iran respectively—countries where many Christians have been persecuted in recent years—have been resettled in the US since the beginning of the year. “You have a lot of persecuted Christians who are refugees and become refugees because of their faith,” said Yang. Yang joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the US government’s rationale for the decline in numbers, what’s happening at a global level to solve the refugee crisis, and what Christians who care about refugees can do regardless of whether the communities settle in their countries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last week, John MacArthur and a dozen other Christian leaders launched a website presenting The Statement on Social Justice & the Gospel. In the statement, the signatories claim that the social justice movement endangers Christians with “an onslaught of dangerous and false teachings that threaten the gospel, misrepresent Scripture, and lead people away from the grace of God in Jesus Christ.” Over the course of 14 sections, the Statement addresses cultural narratives “currently undermining Scripture in the areas of race and ethnicity, manhood and womanhood, and human sexuality” and argues that a secular threat is infiltrating the evangelical church. At the time of this recording, the Statement has received around 7,000 signatures. The statement comes at a time when a series of blog posts and sermons attacking social justice from MacArthur, a popular California pastor and author, had sparked controversy in the evangelical community. The harsh reaction to MacArthur’s ideas was shaped by the events of the past four years, says Washington DC pastor and Gospel Coalition council member Thabiti Anyabwile. “They land in the midst of an evangelical movement that is already fraying and fracturing under the weight of the last five years, if I’m dating this back to the Mike Brown shooting and the fallout,” said Anyabwile. “Evangelicalism as a movement splintered instantly as to how they understood that issue and different quarters circled one another in suspicion and sometimes outright attack.” Further, the statement’s specific attacks on particular nomenclature have been troublesome because its drafters haven’t defined their terms, says Anyabwile. “They’re so imprecise in the terms that are used and defining those terms. What exactly is meant by social justice?” he said. “What are we talking about when we talking about reconciliation or intersectionality or critical race theory? These are things that are thrown out there that are red meat for one quarter of evangelicalism and might be acceptable parlance, depending on how you define it, in other quarters.” Anyabwile joined associate digital producer Morgan Lee and theology editor Caleb Lindgren to offer context about MacArthur’s remarks, explain how intersectionality shows up in the Bible, and what church unity (not uniformity) should look like. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This spring, California assemblyman Evan Low introduced legislation that would have designated paid “conversion therapy” services as a fraudulent business practice. Until last week, Low’s measure seemed set to pass. It moved through both of California’s legislative chambers and governor Jerry Brown had shown no sign of opposition. But last Friday, Low quashed his own legislation after meeting with Christian leaders who had expressed concerns about how the bill might affect their ability to minister to those in the LGBT community. “Some would say this is crazy,” Low, who is gay and the chairman of the legislative LGBTQ caucus, told The Los Angeles Times. “Why would you pause when you don’t need to, when you’re in the driver’s seat?” One answer was Low’s relationship with Kevin Mannoia, the former president of the National Association of Evangelicals and a leader in the Free Methodist Church. Over the course of the summer, Mannoia met with and developed a relationship with Low. Last week, Mannoia wrote an op-ed for The Orange County Register expressing his opposition to the bill—and to reparative therapy. Low dropped the bill the next day. In his years working as an evangelical leader, Mannoia has learned to build relationships with those with whom he may disagree. So what does it take? “Being willing to commit to them as people … and what we believe to be right and appropriate in reflecting Christ well,” said Mannoia. “Not primarily driven by the political agenda, nor even the possibility that we may be used or manipulated, but simply doing what is right because it’s right.” Mannoia joined Morgan Lee, associate digital media producer, and Richard Clark, director of editorial development for SmallGroups.com and PreachingToday.com, to discuss how this story unfolded and what it says about the future of relationships between evangelicals and the LGBT community in one of the country’s most progressive states. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The Catholic world is reeling after a devastating month of sexual abuse revelations. At the beginning of August, a Pennsylvania grand jury reported that hundreds of priests abused at least 1,000 children since the 1940s and that dozens of church officials covered it up. Then, this past week, a prominent archbishop claimed that Pope Francis knew about—and covered up—the actions of Theodore McCarrick, a former cardinal who has been accused of sexually harassing adult seminarians and abusing a child. For lay Catholics, the litany of sex abuse stories has been devastating. “The ultimate source of authority and power that the normal Catholic needs week to week is their priest,” said John Armstrong, the president of ACT3 Network, an organization which works to foster Christian unity. “It’s not the Vatican, not the structure of the Vatican, not even the Pope, though he’s the Holy Father to Catholics.” Because of this close relationship, the church betraying their trust can feel even more intense. “When the priest is an abuser, it breaks all confidence and trust in the authority of the church, which extends all the way to the Vatican because this priest would not be ordained if had not gone up the chain of command and has ultimately the blessing of the Holy Father who is the pastor of pastors and the shepherd of the whole church,” he said. Armstrong joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the nature and extent of the abuse in the Catholic church, the Vatican’s historically contentious relationship with the media, the politics affecting the whole situation, and how it affects evangelical churches. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Check out this headlines from the past decade: “Why Don’t Most Men Go to Church?” Christian Century, October 2011 “Why Men Still Hate Going to Church” CT Pastors, Summer 2012 “7 Actions to Engage Men in Your Church” Pastors.com, March 2014 “Why Do Men Hate Church and What Can Be Done About It?” The Tennessean, Jan 2015 Mending Men’s Ministry, Christianity Today, June 2018 And then there’s a newsletter, The Masculinist, which reflects on a monthly basis on the factors driving men men from church. Aaron Renn, The Masculinist’s author and creator, said the idea for his project came both from the knowledge that church attendance skewed female and the realization a number of non-Christian writers, authors, and cultural commentators were grabbing this group’s attention. “What is it that all of these people are reaching men with essentially a secular self-help message and the [church’s message] isn’t working?” said Renn. “...When I became a Christian I maybe naively took everything in. I felt like the teachings that I was getting about how to be a man and how to interact with women and things of that nature frankly were just not working.” His unhappiness with his church’s teachings led Renn to ask a lot of questions and ultimately “reformulate” himself as a man. Renn joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss why how churches can still be unwelcoming to men despite the fact that men still hold most church pastoral positions, whether this reality of fewer men at church is true when factored by class, race, or education level, and how Christian piety became gendered. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This week was the first year anniversary of the alt-right’s violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Over the course of that weekend, attendees and counter-demonstrators engaged in violent confrontations and one alt-right member drove a car into a crowd, killing a woman and injuring dozens more. The city has subsequently elected a new mayor and lost its city attorney, police chief, and city manager. Meanwhile, many in the city are divided over whether last year’s brazen racist attitudes came from those outside of the city or that only embodying of the town’s racist lineage. Walter Kim was interviewing for a pastoral job the weekend of the protests and moved down to Charlottesville later that month. The pastor for executive leadership at Trinity Presbyterian Church, Kim’s first year on staff has been radically shaped by their aftermath. At his own church, “there has been lament. An urge to repent. A galvanizing toward action. A befuddlement about what that action should be. A desire to individually and institutionally engage. But again, a complexity in knowing what exactly does that look like?” said Kim. “It’s not a challenge where we can say, ‘Let’s do something this year and then we can move onto other issues.’” Responding appropriately is both a sprint and a marathon, Kim says. “It’s a spring in that there are some pressing issues because of the events of August 12 that require us to engage with a measure of urgency but it’s a marathon in the sense that whatever solutions, engagement, or redemptive transportation that our church will be privileged to be a part of will not happen quickly,” said Kim. “The solution needs to match the longevity of the problem. We’re in it for long-haul in seeking redemption, reconciliation, and justice.” Kim joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the disconnect between how Charlottesville sees itself and last year’s events, how churches across the city came together this past weekend, and we can pray for Charlottesville. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Note: Listeners interested in the issues raised by the Bill Hybels allegations may also be interested in Episode 102: When You Hear Sexual Misconduct Allegations About Your Pastor or Episode 80: Supporting the Opposite Gender in the Christian Workplace. Last year, Willow Creek Community Church founder and lead pastor Bill Hybels announced he was passing the baton to two heirs and would be retiring in October 2018. A lot has changed in 10 months. Since that announcement, 10 women have accused Hybels of misconduct. Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that one of leader’s former assistants accused the Willow Creek founder of repeatedly groping her. And on Sunday, Steve Carter, whom Hybels who indicated would succeed him as teaching pastor, announced his resignation. All of this occurred several days before Willow’s Global Leadership Summit, an annual event hosted at Willow’s Barrington campus and streamed at hundreds of locations around the world. As CT, the Chicago Tribune, and now The New York Times have reported on allegations of sexual misconduct and complaints about the Willow Creek board’s response, some less familiar with Willow Creek wonder why the ministry deserves all this attention. “Willow Creek was revolutionary in that previously, churches assumed that all that was needed to reach unbelievers with the gospel was simply to say it one more time and not do anything particularly different,” said Marshall Shelley, a longtime editor for Leadership Journal. Rather than just continue to sling religious language at the world, Willow’s leaders realized that “our culture is spiritually blind and is not going to respond to positively to a message that has grown overly familiar or has grown stale,” said Shelley. “Willow Creek said ‘We need to communicate in a way that is going to get people’s attention. Not say it the way we’ve said it thousands of times before but say it in a way that they’ve never heard it before.’” This insight grew the ministry of the church and spawned the Willow Creek Association, a network for like-minded churches thousands of congregations strong. It’s this latter ministry that organizes the annual Global Leadership Summit, which is simulcast around the world at hundreds of locations. Shelley joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss what influenced and drove Hybels to do church the way he did, what inspired the church’s leadership and business mentality and focus, and what’s next for Willow in the wake of allegations of misconduct against its founder and former leader. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It’s been an interesting year for Canadian evangelicals. This winter, the Canadian government announced that organizations applying for summer youth employment grants had to first affirm their support for abortion. Several weeks ago, in a 7-2 vote, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled against what might have been the country’s first and only Christian law school. Trinity Western University had been in court for years after several provincial law societies declined to accredit the school because of its student covenant, which prohibits sex outside of traditional marriage. And on top of that, their Christian cousins to the south’s perceived support of Donald Trump has made many weary to claim this religious identity as their own. “I would say that there’s a hesitation to even use the word evangelical,” said Karen Stiller, a senior editor with Faith Today magazine, which serves Canada's estimated four million evangelicals. “There’s a sense that we probably believe all the Christian doctrinal positions that define us as evangelicals, but we don’t like to be slotted as Americans, to be honest.” Stiller joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli on Quick to Listen to discuss Canadian evangelicals’ relationship to politics, the ups and downs of their relationship with the American church, and how God is working in the Canadian church. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Here’s how the Revoice Conference describes itself: “Supporting, encouraging, and empowering gay, lesbian, same-sex-attracted, and other LGBT Christians so they can flourish while observing the historic, Christian doctrine of marriage and sexuality.” (Read Quick to Listen host Mark Galli’s interview with its founder.) Since the website first went up, many in the evangelical Twitter world and blogosphere have debated the merits of the conference and of the “spiritual friendship” movement in which the conference is grounded. Some are concerned that “supporting and encouraging” Christians of these “sexual minorities” (as the website names them) is a slippery slope ending in a liberal, relativistic Christianity that has lost its ethical moorings. Others believe that if one observes “the historic, Christian doctrine of marriage,” Christians of any orientation should be able to gather together and talk about their concerns—and thus be supported and encouraged by one another. At stake in these conversations: the debate over whether same-sex attraction in itself is a sin—or if only the acting on that attraction is the sin. “We’ve all heard sermons that say, ‘If you’re being tempted, that’s not sin. It’s only sin if you give into the temptation,’” said Phillip Cary, a professor of philosophy at Eastern University. “Let’s call this the soft line on temptation.” But it turns out that this view isn’t necessarily one that’s been taught by the Protestant greats. “Luther and Calvin and their friends took a hard line on this. They said that the desire that makes up our temptation is already sin, even before we give in or consent to this,” Cary said. And turns out Augustine had his own ideas on the topic. Cary joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss how the Bible defines temptation, why it’s hard for Christians to disentangle sin and temptation, and what it means when some of the pillars of faith reached radically different conclusions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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In 2011, The New York Times profiled several church plants in New York City trying to make it in Manhattan: "In recent decades the number of English-speaking evangelical churches south of Harlem has grown tenfold, to more than 100, said Tony Carnes, a researcher ... who has studied New York churches since the 1970s. Without fanfare, the newcomers have created networks to pay for new churches and to form church-planting incubators, treating the city as a mission field." That was seven years ago. More recently, these church plants are moving into Harlem and into boroughs and neighborhoods less financially well off as center-city Manhattan. These characteristics of New York church planting are part of a larger tension across the country, as dozens of churches increasingly open up in some of the urban area’s most disinvested communities. As they launch, the neighborhoods they inhabit often begin to change—begging the question: Are these churches drivers of changes in the community or merely swept up into economic and social forces outside of their control? José Humphreys is a pastor and was part of a team that founded a church in one of these neighborhoods. “Church plants need to be more is a little more mindful, discerning and self-critical. Look at the different ways they show up. What does your incarnational presence communicate to the community around you? “What do you bring in your embodied presence, in your body, skin, class, your education?” said Humphreys, the author of the forthcoming "Seeing Jesus in East Harlem: What Happens When Churches Show Up and Stay Put." “My wife and I realize that just because her last name is Lopez and my first name is José doesn’t necessarily mean we automatically identify with people in East Harlem.” Humphreys joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and associate theology editor Caleb Lindgren to discuss the catalysts behind church plants entering under-resourced neighborhoods, what separates church plants from the storefront churches, and if people should move into the neighborhoods in which they worship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Christian conservatives praised President Trump’s decision to nominate Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Brett Kavanaugh to replace outgoing Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission president Russell Moore declared that Kavanaugh would be a “strong defender of the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution and Bill of Rights, especially our First Freedom of religious liberty.” “I pray that Judge Kavanaugh will serve for decades to come with a firm and unwavering commitment to our Constitution’s principles,” said Moore. “I join with Baptists and other evangelicals in calling upon the Senate to confirm Judge Kavanaugh without delay.” Others applauding Kavanaugh’s nomination include Wheaton College Billy Graham Center executive director Ed Stetzer, Focus on the Family president Jim Daly, National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference president Sam Rodriguez, the American Center for Law and Justice chief counsel Jay Sekulow, and many of Trump’s evangelical advisors. (Read CT’s report.) But aside from Rodriguez’s support, few evangelicals of color have lauded Kavanaugh’s nomination, a reality which doesn’t surprise Thomas Berg, a professor of law and public policy at the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota). “A lot of black and Hispanic brothers and sisters will not appreciate the things that the conservative court is likely to do,” Berg said. “These justices are more likely to restrict affirmative action. They’re more likely to reject claims of voting rights. … White evangelicals haven’t seen those as part of their agenda.” As Berg sees it, a lack of Christian consensus over the Supreme Court reveals that the “divide between white and black Christians keeps getting deeper.” “People share such strong gospel beliefs and conservative social values, but they’re so divided on other issues,” he said. “Many people who come into this country as immigrants will be born again Christians, but that doesn’t translate into agreement on other issues besides abortion. It’s sad to see the church divided on so many other things including issues of justice.” Berg joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and associate theology editor Caleb Lindgren to talk about how Kavanaugh’s appointment could affect religious liberty and abortion and why the Supreme Court’s future could affect Christian unity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Brazil has won the World Cup five times, and as of press time, appears well on its way to its sixth. The team dramatically imploded at the World Cup it hosted in 2014, but rebounded to win the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016. On the podium, its star Neymar continued the long Brazilian tradition of sporting religious attire on the field, with one key difference: his headband boasted the phrase “100% Jesus,” a nod to the country’s increasingly ascendant evangelical population. At least 25 percent of the 2018 World Cup team has identified as evangelical. One of Brazil’s biggest evangelical movements is the Assembleias de Deus (Assemblies of God), which includes more than 20 million people. For years, it emphasized a believer’s connection to the Holy Spirit. But increasingly, its broadened its spiritual formation focus, says Marcos Simas, a former editor of Cristianismo Hoje, CT’s Brazilian sister publication. “Assemblies of God is becoming more and more rational,” said Simas. “They are studying the Bible more and more.” The denomination recently published a study Bible, which sold 50,000 copies the year it came out. “[Assemblies of God doesn’t want to only offer] healing or spiritual gifts,” said Simas. “Instead they are offering tools for their members to learn more about God, doctrine, and theology.” Simas joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss why Brazilians are embracing evangelicalism, the troubling prevalence of prosperity gospel, and the history of one of Brazil’s most well-known (and somewhat infamous) congregations, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Ever heard a Christian author or speaker refer to our current moment in history as "a secular age"? Or perhaps you've heard someone explain culture in terms of "subtraction stories"? Or "social imaginaries"? "the age of authenticity"? "the immanent frame"? Some of these terms are strange and unfamiliar, but for many thinkers today, they provide a helpful way to understand the seismic cultural shifts we've seen happen in the last couple of generations. From Tim Keller to Russell Moore to Rod Dreher, a lot of Christian thought leaders and quite a few academics are using these ideas to help understand our modern world and it is all based on the work of a guy named Charles Taylor. Charles Taylor is a Canadian Catholic philosopher from Montreal, Quebec, known primarily as a political philosopher and philosopher of social science, but his work spans many topics and disciplines. His 2007 book, A Secular Age, a dense argument against the "secularization thesis" proposed by Max Weber and others, has particularly captured the evangelical intellectual imagination recently. So, in a marketplace crowded with explanations for advancing secularism, why are Taylor’s ideas so popular? Colin Hanson, executive editor of The Gospel Coalition, thinks it has to do with the way that Taylor helps unpack and clarify the cultural changes we're all experiencing but find hard to describe. "A lot of what Taylor does is he'll take something that is rather obvious, but that nobody has named before or that nobody has described," Hanson explains. "It's almost like somebody who gives you language to describe the air that you breathe. Or somebody like David Foster Wallace who talked so much about the fish in the water. You don't even realize what water is because you can't survive without it. The 'social imaginary,' is that thing that is so obvious that nobody needs to talk about it....A lot of things we talk about as Christians just do not comport with the social imaginary." Hanson joined associate theology editor Caleb Lindgren and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss what Christian intellectuals find so valuable in Taylor's work and discuss some of the key insights that Taylor gives us into our changing cultural landscape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last month, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions vowed to enforce a “zero tolerance” policy when it comes to immigration. Here’s one way he described how this would look: "If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law," he said. "If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border." Months before he made this promise, Sessions had already started making good on it. Three weeks prior, the The New York Times had reported that since October, more than 700 children have been taken from adults claiming to be their parents, including more than 100 children under the age of four. As Sessions’ immigration policies have drawn national attention, evangelical leaders have been increasingly speaking out. A letter from the Evangelical Immigration Table said this to President Trump: While illegal entry to the United States can be a misdemeanor criminal violation, past administrations have exercised discretion in determining when to charge individuals with this offense, taking into account the wellbeing of children who may also be involved. A “zero tolerance” policy removes that discretion—with the effect of removing even small children from their parents. The traumatic effects of this separation on these young children, which could be devastating and long-lasting, are of utmost concern. Other Christian female leaders also started a #notwithoutmychild campaign in which they wrote a letter with more than 2,500 signatures to Sessions and Department of Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. Sister Norma Pimental, the executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley on the border of Mexico, has seen most of this situation unfold firsthand. “We need to look at our laws and make sure we protect our laws and country, but at the same time, we cannot overlook that we are talking about human beings,” said Sister Norma. “Our laws can be humane and can be a process that can address things correctly without ignoring that these are human beings, and we must listen to their story and understand why they’re here.” Sister Norma joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the reality of what’s happening on the United States–Mexico border, her relationship with border control, and what impact the attorney general’s words have on those traveling north. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Will North Korea’s recent diplomatic efforts be an answer to South Korean Christians’ prayers? Hopefully, says Sang-Bok David Kim, the chancellor of a South Korean evangelical graduate school, Torch Trinity Graduate University. “North Korea has been threatening South Korea two or three times a year. [They say], ‘We want to make Seoul a city of fire.’ They make weapons. They shoot our navy boat down. They shoot cannonballs into South Korean islands,” said Kim. “We are very sorry they have behaved like that.” But this aggressive behavior hasn’t kept South Korean churches from praying for their Northern neighbors. Instead, South Korean Christians pray frequently for “freedom, for evangelism, for the transformation of the North Korean leaders, that God will be merciful to them and to us so our nation will be unified so we can go up there and evangelize in North Korea and plant 15,000 churches,” he said. Kim joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss his ambitious North Korea church planting plan, how the South Korean church has welcomed refugees from the North, and the surprising way God entered his family’s life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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he US Supreme Court has ruled on the biggest religious liberty case of the year. In a 7–2 vote, the Court sided with a Christian baker who declined to decorate a cake for a same-sex wedding. The baker, Jack Phillips, who had provided cakes for gay customers in other circumstances, argued that making a cake for a same-sex wedding would be an endorsement of the marriage and a violation of his beliefs. In its narrow ruling of Masterpiece Cakeshop Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the Court stated that the penalties a Colorado human rights commission had levied against Jack Phillips violated his First Amendment rights. For the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that “Phillips was entitled to a neutral decisionmaker who would give full and fair consideration to his religious objection as he sought to assert it in all of the circumstances in which this case was presented, considered, and decided.” While legal scholar Robin Fretwell Wilson found much of Kennedy’s opinions compelling, she ultimately doesn’t think a decision that serves both groups can be made through the courts. “There’s a pernicious outcome about the fact that we Americans like to litigate,” said Wilson. “When you have the Supreme Court take a case like Masterpiece, it stalls all the work in state legislatures where people are really trying to write a new script because they think, well, maybe this is going to be swamped by the Supreme Court, there’s going to be a new result reached, and why, in any event, should we spend political capital when the court’s going to do this for us?” Wilson joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss just the true impact of the SCOTUS’ decision, why the Court took the case in the first place, and why adoption agencies are the next critical place where these clashes will play out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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He’s a Canadian psychology professor. A YouTube star. A bestselling author. He’s Jordan Peterson. Here’s how New York Times columnist David Brooks describes him: In his videos, he analyzes classic and biblical texts, he eviscerates identity politics and political correctness and, most important, he delivers stern fatherly lectures to young men on how to be honorable, upright and self-disciplined — how to grow up and take responsibility for their own lives. Despite his success, Peterson is an increasingly polarizing figure. He hates Marxism (and is unafraid to suggest his political opponents are acting in ways consistent with this ideology) and has rankled a number of feminists because of his statements about gender. However, these attitudes aren’t likely the source of his broad appeal, says Wyatt Graham, the executive director of the Gospel Coalition Canada, who has written about Peterson’s work. "I think [most people] see him as essentially, get up with your shoulders straight, be responsible, don't be that 30-year-old whose parents are trying to evict him right now on CNN, and be responsible for your life,” said Graham. “A lot of young people, a lot of young men in particular, love that part of his message.” Graham joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss what makes Peterson different from other self-help gurus, what to make of his more controversial convictions, and how Christians should view his what types of theological concerns believers should have about his messages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It’s been quite a week for Southern Baptists. Since this podcast was recorded, Baptist Press reported that a senior professor of evangelism and student ministry at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary had resigned over “personal and spiritual issues.” It’s been quite a week for Southern Baptists. Since this podcast was recorded, Baptist Press reported that a senior professor of evangelism and student ministry at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary had resigned over “personal and spiritual issues.” The same article also reported that an Alabama pastor had resigned as executive director of Connect316 and publisher of SBC Today over a Facebook post that seemed to make light of gang rape at the expense of a number of prominent Southern Baptist leaders. This news came just hours after Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Al Mohler published a piece he headlined “The Wrath of God Poured Out: The Humiliation of the Southern Baptist Convention.” And just hours before, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary trustees removed Paige Patterson as president. That’s just from this week. We could go back further. So what’s going on? We asked longtime Southern Baptist leader Ed Stetzer, now executive director of Wheaton College’s Billy Graham Center, to shed light on everything happening to America’s largest Protestant denomination. Stetzer joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss whether or not the denomination is truly in a #MeToo moment (like Mohler has claimed), why Southern Baptist leaders generally don’t publicly criticize each other, and what role the internet and social media have played in the events of the past month. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Nigerian Christians have had enough. Thousands took to the streets this week after an attack during a church service left nearly two dozen dead last month. Among the victims were two priests, spurring Catholic leaders to protest the government for failing to do enough to protect the Christian community. Divided between a predominantly Muslim north and a predominantly Christian south, the country is home to some of the world’s most vicious scenes of religious conflict. Boko Haram has claimed responsibility for a spate of attacks on Christian in the last decade. But, in recent years, the community faces another enemy known as the Fulani Herdsmen, the group behind the most recent attacks. Nigerian Christians need the support of their brothers and sisters in Christ, said Gideon Para-Mallam, the former regional secretary for the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, the international version of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. “It’s important that believers all the world pray for us,” said Para-Mallam. “It’s also really important that the governments of the world really, really look closely and critically at what is happening in Nigeria. Just look at the sequence, from the systemic to the frontal attacks, to the killing of Christians, and now you’re beginning to ask Christians to move away from their ancestral homes. It’s pointing somewhere and I think we need to discover that.” Para-Mallam joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the history behind the country’s Muslim-Christian conflict, why the government has been so ineffective at fighting Islamists, and why there may be a bigger threat to the church than extremism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Over the past two months, authorities have closed more than 7,000 churches across Rwanda for failing to comply with health, safety, and noise regulations. As CT has previously reported: President Paul Kagame welcomed the shutdowns but was stunned at the scale: “700 churches in Kigali?” he said during a government dialogue in March. “Are these boreholes that give people water? I don’t think we have as many boreholes. Do we even have as many factories? This has been a mess!” The government isn’t clamping down only on what it deems to be issues of physical safety. Current laws allow Rwandans to open churches without requiring pastors to go through any training. A new law specific to faith-based organizations will require potential pastors to get a theology degree before they plant a church. Many Christian leaders aren’t bothered by these increased regulations, including Charles Mugisha, the founder and chancellor of Africa College of Theology. “The government gets irritated when you start preaching the type of American prosperity gospel which many African preachers are learning from American television and YouTube,” said Mugisha, who also is also a pastor and the leader of the nonprofit African New Life. “The government becomes protective of its citizens if a church or preacher begins to manipulate it.” Mugisha joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss why he believes the government is closing churches for good reasons, how Rwanda’s excruciating genocide affected its faith, and how he became friends with Saddleback pastor Rick Warren. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Andrew Brunson had been ministering in Izmir, Turkey, for nearly a quarter of a century before it all changed. In 2016, the American pastor was arrested and thrown in jail, without knowing his charges and without bail. When Brunson’s trial finally started last month, he learned that he had been charged “of fueling unrest in the country through alleged involvement with exiled cleric Fethullah Gülen and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), an insurgent group.” Both movements are seen as enemies and threats to the Turkish government. Brunson is the “Christian pawn” in Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan’s political schemes, says Brian Stiller, the global ambassador for World Evangelical Alliance. Turkey wants the United States to extradite Gülen, making Brunson’s nationality a bonus for the regime, he suggested. While Brunson’s faith isn’t the only reason that he’s been singled out by the Turkish community, it does reinforce the fact that Turkey is a hard place for Christians, says Stiller. “It’s a country of 150 churches in a state that is 80 million people,” said Stiller. “You are a small minority. You are persecuted in many social and psychological ways.” Stiller joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss how Turkey’s political unrest fueled Brunson’s arrest and why the Christian community is so fragmented. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Note: Malachi 2, ‘I hate divorce.’ Said by guest as 5:2, says “The man who hates and divorces his wife,” says the Lord, the God of Israel, “does violence to the one he should protect.” In 2000, Paige Patterson was asked about women who are abused by their husbands. Here’s what the now-president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary said: It depends on the level of abuse to some degree. I have never in my ministry counseled that anybody seek a divorce, and I do think that’s always wrong counsel. There have been, however, an occasion or two when the level of the abuse was serious enough, dangerous enough, immoral enough that I have counseled temporary separation and the seeking of help. I would urge you to understand that that should happen only in the most serious of cases. . . . More often, when you face abuse, it is of a less serious variety. These comments recirculated on social media over the weekend, not surprisingly sparking fierce criticism of Patterson’s remarks. On Sunday, Patterson released a statement where he clarified that his happiness in the situation came from seeing this woman’s husband return to church. He also said that physical or sexual abuse should be reported to the appropriate authorities, “as I have always done.” Patterson also stated that, “I have also said that I have never recommended or prescribed divorce. How could I as a minister of the Gospel? The Bible makes clear the way in which God views divorce.” Patterson’s statement seemed to suggest that abuse was not included as one of the ways in which divorce is biblically sanctioned. But that understanding isn’t really a biblical one, says Justin Holcomb, an ordained minister and the co-author of Is It My Fault?: Hope and Healing for Those Suffering Domestic Violence. “Sometimes people like to out-conservative the Bible. … I appreciate the desire stay to close to the authority of Scripture,” Holcomb said. But some Christians may be wary about sanctioning divorce after abuse because it’s not explicitly mentioned as a cause to end a marriage, despite the fact that the Bible speaks frankly about violence and abuse, he says. “In Psalm 11:5, the psalmist, referring to God, says ‘I hate the one who does violence and abuses,’” said Holcomb. “Some people want to quote Malachi 2, ‘I hate divorce.’ If that’s how that’s interpreted—which I’ve already put a question mark to—well you can find a whole bunch more passages that say that God hates the violent and the oppressor. Holcomb joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to explain how he interprets Malachi 2, if there is a theology or faith practice that correlates with spouse abuse, and if there’s a real tension between pursuing a biblical marriage and taking a hard line on domestic violence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Rebecca McLaughlin doesn’t sit with her husband at church. After reassuring her church friend that her family’s seating choices had nothing to do with the status of her marital relationship, she felt compelled to explain why. McLaughlin wrote for CT Women: Every Sunday, my husband and I walk into church and see someone new sitting alone. If possible, we go and sit with them. If there are two people, we divide. It’s often awkward and uncomfortable but nonetheless worth it. Why? Because the gospel is a story of juxtaposition in community: Jesus sat with a Samaritan woman and asked her for a drink. Phillip got into the chariot with an Ethiopian eunuch. The early church ate together. She expanded on this idea for Quick to Listen. “I don’t for a minute question that we should sit together as a family at church,” said McLaughlin, who is the co-founder of the consulting organization Vocable Communications. “I’m questioning what family is. It seems to me that the New Testament drives a truck through our modern, Western, dare-I-say American conception of family as being a mom and dad and 2.4 kids.” McLaughlin joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen this week to talk about the strong feelings her actions have provoked, how to show hospitality to extroverts and introverts at church, and how cultural backgrounds are at play in how we welcome other people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Several dozen evangelical leaders from across the country gathered at Wheaton College on Monday and Tuesday this week. In anticipation of the event, The Washington Post teased the meeting: “Dozens of evangelical leaders meet to discuss how Trump era has unleashed ‘grotesque caricature’ of their faith.” But the meeting turned out not to be a giant pilgrimage opposing Trump. “No, absolutely not,” said Harold Smith, Christianity Today’s president and CEO, who attended the summit. “It was like a neighborhood gathering that got some press attention as people were expecting something bigger than ever this meeting had hoped to be,” said Ted Olsen, CT’s editorial director, who also attended. “This was like a large luncheon more than anything else.” Yet both men acknowledge that summits and conferences have played a critical role in the evangelical movement. Olsen and Smith joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee on Quick to Listen this week to discuss how conferences can help different generations of the church better hear each other, the extent to which conferences affirm versus challenge their audiences, and the role that advances in international travel have played in Christians getting together from around the globe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last week, the US government shutdown the classified advertising website Backpage.com on allegations that the site was profiting off of illegal prostitution. The website and its affiliates were seized by a joint effort of the FBI, Post Office, and IRS. Online classifieds have long been criticized for facilitating sex trafficking. In 2010, human rights activists called Craigslist the "biggest online hub for selling women against their will.” (Craigslist gave up its adult service page listings in 2010.) In 2012, New York Times columnist Nick Kristof called Backpage “a godsend to pimps, allowing customers to order a girl online as if she were a pizza.” Online classifieds can quickly become part of traffickers’ “business plan,” says Sandra Morgan, director of the Global Center for Women and Justice at Vanguard University. “Finding ways to manage the internet highway is how we do a better job protecting our communities,” Morgan said. Morgan joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss how Backpage’s departure will affect sex trafficking in the United States, how new federal legislation could impact how traffickers get prosecuted and why evangelicals are so passionate about helping the sexually exploited. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This week, we are remembering the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.who was assassinated 50 years ago on April 4, 1968. Among the many events scheduled for this week, The Gospel Coalition and the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission are holding a summit in Memphis on racial unity. But finding evangelicals willing to align with the Civil Rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s was much more difficult. Reformed Theological Seminary professor Carl Ellis participated in the Civil Rights movement. But when he became a (Protestant) Christian through his relationships with several evangelical leaders, he quickly began to feel a tension between his newfound faith and his commitment to King’s cause. “That unspoken evangelical thing came upon me, ‘You should not be concerned about Civil Rights,’” said Ellis about the time after his conversion. “I never read any explicit stuff about it but just the sense that I got, it was part of the whole ethos of what it meant to be an evangelical back then.” That “ethos” and environment is what Michael Hammond, a dean at Taylor University’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Biblical Studies has studied. “When we talk about October of 1956, Rosa Parks was arrested in 1955 and that sets off a year-long bus boycott in Montgomery,” said Hammond. The Supreme Court ultimately issues a ruling banning segregation on public transportation in November 1956. “That’s a month after CT is first published,” said Hammond. “Imagine that ramp-up, if you can think of Christianity Today in 1955, 1956, these are issues that at the forefront of the American news.” In a special episode of Quick to Listen, Hammond shares about Christianity Today responded to MLK and the Civil Rights movement and Ellis talks about how his own experience of faith and activism in the 1950s and 1960s with associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last week, the Chicago Tribune reported on multiple allegations against Willow Creek Community Church founder and longtime pastor Bill Hybels. “The alleged behavior included suggestive comments, extended hugs, an unwanted kiss, and invitations to hotel rooms. It also included an allegation of a prolonged consensual affair with a married woman who later said her claim about the affair was not true.” Hybels and his church have denied the allegations reported by the Tribune. Hybels, is of course, not the first megachurch pastor, or even pastor, to be embroiled in allegations of adultery and sexual misconduct. Throughout the years, Christianity Today has reported on a number of high-profile ministry leaders who lost their jobs after they confessed to sexual sin. (In fact, news that Southern Baptist leader Frank Page resigned from ministry over a “morally inappropriate relationship” broke right after this podcast was recorded.) Most pastors who have been guilty of inappropriate relationships aren’t in a great place spiritually, says Jim Wilhoit, a professor of Christian formation at Wheaton College who has counseled church leaders who have confessed to sexual misconduct. “No one that I’ve talked with that has had an affair has had what I would say at that time a vital and well-developed relationship with Christ,” said Wilhoit. “I’m just not very sanguine about the spiritual life of many American pastors.” Wilhoit joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss why pastors commit sexual sin, when congregations should know about allegations against ministry leaders, and how the expectations of the modern pastorate may make it hard for a pastor to maintain a grounded spiritual life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Oklahoma politician James Lankford became a US Senator in 2015, the year before Donald Trump officially became the Republican Party’s candidate. Lankford didn’t support Trump in the GOP’s primary but ultimately backed him during the election. “What I really look for in a presidential candidate is someone who is a great role model, and I didn’t get that this time,” said Lankford. “I was very frustrated. I didn’t have a good option. I didn’t have that person who I would say is a great role model for my daughters and for my family.” Lankford has served nearly a decade in Washington, DC. But before that, the Southern Baptist thought he had found his calling as a Christian summer camp director. When he decided to transition, he found peace in his change in calling after observing the Bible’s attention to politics. “There are about 36 and a half books in the Old Testament that are written to, by, or about a political leader. It was often the prophet going to a king, King David writing in a psalm, or Solomon writing in Proverbs,” said Lankford. “A third of the New Testament was written to a political leader: the Book of Luke and the Book of Acts.” Lankford joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss why he started a bipartisan Bible study, what he thinks of the president’s tweets, and why he’s challenging white people when it comes to race. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Over the past decade, hundreds of Muslim migrants in Europe have encountered Christianity and embraced the gospel. In 2012, CT reported on the dozens of Iranian Muslims who had converted after moving to Germany. David Cashin, who has worked in ministry in Sweden and Bangladesh and taught courses in Islamic history, theology, and Muslim-Christian relations, believes something similar is also happening in Sweden. “The largest revival in the last 100 years is going on right now, and it’s primarily Muslims becoming Christians,” said Cashin, a professor of intercultural studies at Columbia Biblical Seminary. In recent years, as refugees have arrived in Western Europe from Iraq and Syria, some members of these communities have in turn become Christians. Yet, Christian communities in Germany and Sweden, comprising both those from the historic Middle Eastern church as well as recent converts, have been subject to abuse and harassment from radical Muslims. In 2017, Open Doors surveyed 123 Christian asylum seekers in Sweden. According to the report: More than half of all participants in the survey (53%) reported that they have been affected by violent assaults at least once, due to their Christian faith. Almost half of all participants (45%) in the survey reported that they have been threatened to death at least once and 6% reported that they have been a target of sexual assaults. Cashin joined associate editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss why Iranian migrants, more than any others from the Middle East, are drawn to Christianity, whether or not all these conversions are bona fide, and what the Western Europen governments must do to better protect migrant religious minority communities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last week, China announced that it would drop presidency term limits, effectively allowing current president Xi Jinping to serve indefinitely. The leader is currently concluding his first five-year term, one not particularly positive for the country’s Christians. During his time in office, a provincial government engaged in a multi-year campaign to remove crosses from the tops of churches and Xi suggested that religions that inadequately conformed to Communist ideals threatened the country’s government, and therefore must become more “Chinese-oriented.” Last fall, the Communist party reportedly visited Christian households in Jiangxi province, forcibly removing dozens of Christian symbols from living rooms and replacing them with pictures of Xi. In February, the government hit the faith community with another set of restrictions. Under these regulations, religious groups must gain government approval for any sort of religious activity, including using one’s personal home for a religious practice, publishing religious materials, calling oneself a pastor, or studying theology. The government accepted the “worst possible version” of the restrictions, said Fenggang Yang, the director of the Center on Religion and Chinese Society at Purdue University. The government could have been more pragmatic in its approach and treated this as a “social management issue.” “But these [restrictions] are not,” he said. “It’s going to be very difficult or impossible to implement or enforce the restrictions.” Yang joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the roots of the government’s anti-religion attitudes, how Christians are speaking out against the recent term limits, and the fledgling Chinese missions movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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In 2013, IBT Media purchased the acclaimed American magazine Newsweek. This acquisition had immediate positive effects for the floundering publication when its new owners announced a return to print. But some wondered about the identity and desired endgame of its new owners. “Who’s Behind Newsweek?” asked a 2014 Mother Jones report. “Why are the new owners so anxious to hide their ties to an enigmatic religious figure?” The article went on to identify the true owner of the publication as Korean religious figure David Jang, whom CT had profiled two years earlier. “The Second Coming Christ Controversy” explained that Jang and his followers had founded a number of media outlets including The Christian Post, Christian Today, and the International Business Times. In addition, they’d started a Christian college in California known as Olivet University (no relation to Olivet Nazarene University) and were key influencers in the World Evangelical Alliance. But the group wasn’t just a Korean evangelical ministry expanding its ministry to the West. Sources also alleged that the group had encouraged the belief that Jang was the “Second Coming Christ.” In the years since CT and Mother Jones’s reporting (much of which revealed illegal work arrangements for Olivet’s primarily immigrant students), IBT Media (now known as Newsweek Media Group) has experienced a number of controversies. Last week, three editors were fired after fighting with management over what they believed had been a breach of journalistic ethics in this story, “Why is the Manhattan DA looking at Newsweek’s ties to a Christian university?” Ben Dooley, who authored Mother Jones’s piece, joined associate digital media producer and former Christian Post reporter Morgan Lee and editorial director and co-author of CT’s 2012 Jang report Ted Olsen to discuss the group’s bizarre theological claims, how their media properties relate to their desire for influence in the evangelical world, and whether this latest controversy will change anything about how they operate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Evangelist Billy Graham died this week. Christianity Today published more than two dozen articles on our site as part of our special commemorative coverage. But when you lived 99 years it can be hard to capture a life, even with this volume of pieces. This week on Quick to Listen historian and author of America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation Grant Wacker joined associate editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to talk about the regrets, paradoxes, and surprises of the life of the most prolific religious people our time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Is suffering from mental illness the result of personal sin? Last week, many Christians felt two prominent evangelical ministries affirmed that this was the case. At last week’s evangelical women’s conference the IF Gathering, speaker Rebekah Lyons, in telling about her daughter’s anxiety attacks, suggested that mental illness could be healed through prayer. The incidents at IF occurred several days after John Piper’s Desiring God ministry tweeted “We will find mental health when we stop staring in the mirror, and fix our eyes on the strength and beauty of God.” Nearly 500 people responded to the tweet, saying that the message implied that counselors and medication were unnecessary to cure mental illness. Both ministries later distanced themselves from these comments. IF Gathering founder Jennie Allen later clarified that the ministry supports counseling/medication and doesn't think mental illness is sinful. Desiring God apologized for “leaving off the link that gives the context quoting Clyde Kilby from more than 40 years ago when ‘mental health’ didn’t have the same technical connotations as today.” This link between mental illness, sin, and spirituality “isn’t really a Christian or religious idea,” says Amy Simpson, the author of Troubled Minds: Mental Illness and the Church’s Mission. “It’s really rooted in superstition and a misunderstanding of what mental illness is,” said Simpson. In the 20th century, psychiatry and psychology were heavily secular practices and Sigmund Freud saw religion itself as a form of neurosis. “Many people responded to that, distancing themselves from psychiatry and psychology and thinking they’re anti-God, they’re anti-religion, they’re anti-faith, therefore we don’t want to have anything to do with them,” said Simpson. Simpson joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss spiritual oppression and mental illness in the Gospels, how our understanding of the brain has transformed in the past 50 years, and where sin fits into this discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The ancient Olympics lasted more than a millennium before they were stopped by—you guessed it—Christians. It’s true: In AD 390, Emperor Theodosius I criticized the games as pagan and banned them. Ironically or not, faith also played a role in the beginning of the modern Olympics. One of the theologies undergirding the resurrection of the Olympics was “muscular Christianity,” a philosophy of “developing leaders with moral integrity and grit while also being physically strong,” said Nicholas Watson, a professor of sport and social justice at York St John University in the United Kingdom. “[Modern Olympics father] Baron de Coubertin’s vision and philosophy for the Olympics came by welding together ideas from the philosophy of the ancient Olympics in Greece and muscular Christianity that was birthed in the UK,” Watson said. This week on Quick to Listen, Watson joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss Western Christian beliefs about exercise in the 19th century, why world peace was a goal sought by the Olympics’ creators, and the countercultural narrative presented by the Special Olympics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last week, the US Senate confirmed Sam Brownback as America’s next ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom. The appointment came six months after President Trump had nominated the former Kansas Republican governor. Brown’s position is part of the Office of International Religious Freedom (IRF), a State Department office which monitors persecution and discrimination on a global scale. Created during the Clinton administration in 1998, the IRF exists as part of a larger American foreign policy strategy of promoting international religious freedom. “It’s not only the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do,” said Melissa Rogers, who previously served as the executive director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships in the Obama administration. “We find that when societies embrace religious liberty for all, they reap all kinds of benefits like building a more peaceful, just, stable, and more productive society. It makes the world a more peaceful and productive place.” Rogers joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the US strategies for advocating for religious freedom, why Western Christians’ speaking up for religious minorities in their own nation helps the persecuted church overseas, and if this office is just another way America imposes its values on other countries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Writer Rod Dreher’s recent comments on poverty and immigration have sparked intense criticism by Christians and non-Christians alike. In a recent post, Dreher wrote about his conflicted feelings on Trump’s derogatory remarks about African countries by drawing a comparison to immigrants from these countries and public housing: Let’s think about Section 8 housing. If word got out that the government was planning to build a housing project for the poor in your neighborhood, how would you feel about it? Be honest with yourself. Nobody would consider this good news. You wouldn’t consider it good news because you don’t want the destructive culture of the poor imported into your neighborhood. Drive over to the poor part of town, and see what a s---hole it is. Do you want the people who turned their neighborhood a s---hole to bring the s---hole to your street? No, you don’t. Be honest, you don’t. Russell Jeung has lived with his family for more than two decades in one of Oakland, California’s most dangerous neighborhoods. While Jeung loves his community, living in the Murder Dubs hasn’t always been easy. When he was a graduate student, his laptop was stolen. He’s also witnessed shootings and knows sex traffickers work out of his neighborhood. “Do we want the poor’s ‘destructive culture’? No, of course not. The poor don’t want the destructive culture in their own communities,” said Jeung, who is also the chair of Asian American studies department at San Francisco State University. “Nobody wants murder, violence, or theft...All God’s children long for his wholeness, long for life to be lived under his rule and to have that peace and justice.” Russell joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss our tendency to overly romanticize or stigmatize the poor, the best and worst times of life in Murder Dubs, and how Christians should decide where they live. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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“This is Your Brain on Trump TV,” is the title of a recent piece at The American Conservative published in between the president’s incendiary tweets about North Korea and his leaked disparaging remarks about those from African countries and Haiti. While the former comments caused concern, the latter led to what has now become a routine cycle of debate, criticism, analysis, and pushback. “Trump fascinates all Americans, it seems,” wrote Gracy Olmstead. “We hate him or love him, fear him or idolize him.” Christians are not immune to these reactions, a state that can often leave news consumers exhausted, burned out, and unclear about how to separate inflammatory but ultimately unsubstantial reports from stories reporting on news with severe or dire consequences. “The style of Trump’s comments are like something you’d expect to see out of a soap opera or something on TV and yet they’re happening in the real world, so how are supposed to react to something that in essence seems too incendiary or sensational to take seriously but could threaten nuclear war?” said Olmstead. “What’s the wise and measured stance to take as a media person? As a citizen?” Olmstead joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss how to avoid news burnout, the media’s particular challenge in the Trump era and internet age, and the extraordinary prescience of Neil Postman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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In 2001, a 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck El Salvador, killing nearly 1,000 people. In the wake of the humanitarian disaster triggered by the natural disaster, the United States welcomed nearly 200,000 Salvadorans to live and work legally. (Undocumented Salvadorans already in America could also apply for status.) For more than 15 years, this population has existed under temporary protected status. This week, the Trump administration announced that this program will end in fall 2019. “We’re in 2018, 17 years on, and the country has in fact largely recovered from the earthquakes. The Trump administration at least on that point is absolutely correct,” said Stephen Offutt, an associate professor of development studies at Asbury Theological Seminary. “What’s not been taken into account is the fact that El Salvador is still a dangerous place.” While Salvadorian churches at times offer the only options for gang members hoping to leave that life behind, “that’s not the whole story,” said Offutt. Instead, as CT reported last year, pastors and other religious leaders have been kidnapped or extorted by the gangs. “One of the reasons I respect pastors in these communities so much is because they stay there,” he said. Offutt joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and guest host, managing editor Andy Olsen, to discuss how US immigration policies may defund Salvadorean churches, the intensity of the violence in the country, and how pastors instruct their congregations to interact with gangs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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For more than a week, thousands of Iranians have taken to the streets to protest their government. Spurred by anger over a weak economy and increasing fuel and food prices, their grievances accompany frustration that loosening economic sanctions have had little effect on their everyday lives. Nearly all the protesters are Muslims—no surprise in a country where 99 percent of the population adheres to Islam. Despite Muslims’ numeric dominance, some researchers say there’s no country in the world where Christianity is growing faster than in Iran today, according to David Yeghnazar, the executive director of Elam Ministries, a nonprofit that serves Iranian Christians. “Iranians have become the most open people to the gospel,” said Yeghnazar. Unlike in other parts of the Middle East, the country’s historic churches have increasingly taken on an evangelistic role and committed themselves to praying for nonbelievers in their country, he says. Yeghnazar joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss how Iranian Christians feel about the latest protests, how recent political history has opened the country to the gospel, and how long Christianity has existed in Persia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This episode previously aired in January 2017 and showcases some of what we believe Quick to Listen does best. Enjoy and see you next year! --- So, fake news. In recent months, these two words have been used as a weapon by the president to discredit the media (e.g., CNN) or describe the fabrication of a bogus report on Clinton voter fraud. Fake news isn’t new—nearly a decade ago, people started sharing reports of Barack Obama’s alleged Muslim faith as fact. Further, Christians have at times been responsible for spreading these false reports. (“I think it’s really important for your readers to know that I have been a member of the same church for almost 20 years, and I have never practiced Islam,” Obama told CT back in 2008.) But at least one Christian can take credit for challenging the church and society to take the information age much more seriously. Twentieth century French Christian philosopher Jacques Ellul thought deeply about the impact of mainstream media. Ellul was particularly interested in the century’s obsession with efficiency, says Lisa Richmond, who recently translated his Presence in the Modern World from French. When this was concept was applied to communication, Ellul referred to it as a propaganda. “Propaganda, to Ellul, is a way of using language and images to accomplish a particular objective. It is the most effective way to achieve the outcome that you want to get,” said Richmond, paraphrasing Ellul. “Ellul would argue that for the propagandist, truth is simply a tool to be used when it is the most effective way to accomplish your goal. If it is not the most effective way, then you use falsehood.” Our society has largely learned to communicate within this framework, says Robinson. “Once propaganda is at work in society, it forces other people to engage propaganda,” she said. “That can be contrasted with an ethical true desire to communicate in which our hope is that we understand truth more fully. That’s not the objective of the propagandist. It is to accomplish a certain outcome. If truth serves that outcome, great. If not, discard it.” Robinson joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor-in-chief Mark Galli to discuss how propaganda gives us a sense of belonging, why Christians are complicit in our culture of information overload, and whether journalists can ever escape bias. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Once a year, many Christian international anti-poverty nonprofits release Christmas catalogs filled with items they hope you’ll purchase—only the gifts aren’t for anyone you know. Instead, most catalogs sent by groups like World Vision, Heifer International, and Compassion International boast items like livestock and other agricultural products that they’re hoping you’ll buy for those in need overseas. But is the strategy the best model to fight poverty? Why not give cash? “We tend to trust our family members with cash gifts,” said economist Bruce Wydick. “But in the past, at least, we’ve had much less trust for how people spend cash.” In CT’s December cover story, Wydick explores research that suggests giving cash may be one of the best ways to fight poverty. “One of the things that’s liberating about this system is that people are accountable to themselves for how they use the money,” he said. “No one is holding their hand, telling them they should do this or that.” Wydick joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the biblical tension between generosity and accountability, fighting paternalism in development work, and how cell phones connect to fighting poverty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last week, President Trump announced that the United States would be moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. While many Middle Eastern Christians have been critical of this decision, some American evangelical leaders have praised the move. “I think a lot of evangelicals support Israel for a sense of justice,” said Gerald McDermott, the author of Israel Matters: Why Christians Must Think Differently about the People and the Land. “They see Israel as a light of freedom and democracy in a Middle East that is filled with the darkness of tyranny.” McDermott, who has traveled to Israel more than a dozen times, acknowledged that the move can make things complicated for Palestinian Christians. “They’re rightly afraid that anything the United States does will be used again them by their Muslim cousins,” said McDermott. “They’re often considered subversives because they’re Christians, the United States is considered a Christian country, and anything the United States does that the Palestinian leadership doesn’t like must be supported by Palestinian Christians.” McDermott joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss whether Christians should care about the location of the American embassy, the divide between Middle Eastern and American Christians over Jerusalem’s recognition as Israel’s capital, and where biblical prophecy fits into this discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Earlier this week, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM) released a statement addressing its namesake’s credentials, which have recently been under fire. “In earlier years, ‘Dr.’ did appear before Ravi’s name in some of our materials, including on our website, which is an appropriate and acceptable practice with honorary doctorates,” stated RZIM. “However, because this practice can be contentious in certain circles, we no longer use it.” From CT’s report: "According to the biography currently posted on RZIM’s website, Zacharias received a master of divinity degree from Trinity International University and 'has conferred ten honorary doctorates, including a Doctor of Laws and a Doctor of Sacred Theology. "Up until earlier this year, the RZIM bio had not used the phrase 'honorary doctorates;' instead, it had stated that Zacharias had been 'honored with the conferring of six doctoral degrees.' The site also previously referred to him as 'Dr. Zacharias' through 2014, as did multiple press releases, news features, and event postings." Apologist and religious studies professor John G. Stackhouse wasn’t surprised by the news. “There’s a long and not very edifying tradition of Christian evangelists and speakers inflating their credentials,” said Stackhouse. Stackhouse says that he personally confronted two RIZM employees about problems he saw with Zacharias’s credentials but that no changes were made after the conversation. “Ravi Zacharias is the biggest name in apologetics currently,” said Stackhouse. “As he goes, so goes apologetics so it’s really important that he be scrupulous in everything he does.” Stackhouse recently joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the temptation for Christian leaders to inflate their credentials and achievements, what responsibility the church has in encouraging that sort of behavior, and how we might better hold each other accountable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Pope Francis’ trip to Myanmar this week has highlighted its small but inspiring Christian community. Less than 10 percent of the population, Christians are most likely to be represented in the country’s minority ethnic groups, communities that have long clashed with the Buddhist-influenced federal government. Despite this decades’ long violence that’s persisted even as the country has transitioned to a constitutional democracy, the Christian community has remained passionate about their faith, says Steve Gumaer, the founder of Partners Relief & Development, a ministry that has long worked with Myanmar’s minority ethnic communities. “These young guys were running around in a war zone where people were getting raped and killed and beaten to death and they were out there starting churches among these displaced people,” said Gumaer, who first traveled to the country in the 1990s. “I was completely inspired and blown away.” Gumaer joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss Burmese Christians support of the persecuted Rohingya, how Christianity first traveled to Myanmar and why the Pope’s visit has disappointed him. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We asked you to write us reviews and ask us questions. Many of you did! This week on Quick to Listen, hosts Morgan Lee and Mark Galli offer you their thoughts on changing people’s minds, where evangelicalism is headed, and their favorite music of the year. Also, Morgan shares another secret talent!

Thanks everyone for listening and happy Thanksgiving! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Allegations of sexual impropriety against the longtime Religious Right celebrity and current Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore have forced the church to wrestle once again with sexual harassment and assault. While we don’t know whether the claims that seven women have leveled against Moore are true, in general, when people claim to have been victims of sexual assault or abuse, Christians ought to believe them, says Liberty University English professor Karen Swallow Prior. “People are denying the reality that most women grow up and live their lives being harassed, if not assaulted, and being propositioned or being pursued inappropriately,” she said. “Almost every woman I know, including myself, has had something like that happen to them. This is just the world we grow up in.” Prior recently joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss how quick we should be to distance ourselves from those who sin grievously or egregiously misrepresent us and what public repentance and confession might look like. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It’s just days after the worst mass shooting in American history on a church property. As CT reported earlier this week: "At least 26 worshipers, ranging in ages from 5 to 72, have died from First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, according to Texas authorities. Another 20 worshipers were injured." Read Bart Barber’s response to the Sutherland Springs shootings: A Small Rural Church Is Hard to Kill Increasingly, the aftermath of these shootings has devolved into a furious national debate over guns, with little consensus or resolution in sight. Christians need to step up and moderate the rhetoric, says Bart Barber, who pastors a Baptist church in Texas and holds a PhD in church history from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. “The more that those calling for gun control legislation mock those calling for prayer, the less likely constructive dialogue is,” said Barber. “The more people calling for Second Amendment protection bristle at taking common-sense measures and castigate people as out-of-touch, unrealistic, wild-eyed liberals, the less likely we are to have a constructive conversation.” Barber’s church includes many gun owners, including those who bring their weapons to church. While he doesn’t directly preach about guns, he has taught on passages of the Bible that discuss revenge, the role of authority, and Christ’s teaching on how to treat one’s enemies. “There will be people all over the country this week that go to church Sunday carrying a concealed weapon, telling themselves, ‘If this comes to my congregation, protecting my children is going to be more than lying on top of them. If this comes to my congregation, the people sitting next to me in the pews, I’m going to do something to try to save them,’” said Barber. “In the back of the mind they may be saying, ‘and save me too,’ but this is the way the theological conversation takes place.” Barber recently joined associate digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss the United States’ historical relationship with guns, the role that Quakers played in passing the Second Amendment, and why evangelicals continue to own guns today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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In October, Nepal criminalized Christian conversion and evangelism. The law criminalizes sharing one’s faith and threatens would-be lawbreakers with fines of more than $700 and up to five years in prison. Support for anti-conversion laws isn’t limited to Nepal’s secular government. CT’s coverage of Nepal’s decision was shared by Hindu nationalist activists hoping to convince the Indian government to make the same decision. Anti-conversion laws already exist in nearby Sri Lanka, and the State Department has previously flagged them and blasphemy laws as some of its biggest concerns for religious freedom globally. These laws are a result of the fallen human condition, says Chris Seiple, the president emeritus of the Institute for Global Engagement, a religious freedom advocacy group. “It’s a rare thing when you don’t have immaturity and insecurity among the majority,” said Seiple. “To have that type of security and accept other faiths and to allow for free competition of ideas and beliefs as good for the country is not the norm.” Seiple suggests that the story of Jesus talking to the woman at the well is a model for those who do wish to share their faith in countries hostile to religious freedom. “If we can be in conversations, we can be a position to evangelize, not proselytize, when we’ve earned the right to speak into a relationship,” he said. Seiple joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss if there’s ever an upside to anti-conversion laws, how politics and culture enable or discourage these measures, and how to change a government’s mind on religious freedom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Next month, the half-a-billion-dollar, genre-busting, and technologically groundbreaking Museum of the Bible will open its doors in Washington, DC. Here’s what visitors can expect, courtesy of our November cover story: Looking up, a visitor might see a sprawling digital canopy of trees, one of five possible scenes playing on a ceiling-mounted 140-foot-long LED display. The light emitted by the false sky intensifies in surrounding glass walls and polished floors; bystanders are awash in illumination. At the end of the hall, a floating staircase winds up into the air without the aid of steel supports; docents clad in Ancient Near Eastern garb shuffle by to assume stations in the world of the distant past. It’ll be something else. In addition to its impressive technology and exhibits, the museum may also help address anachronism, one of the biggest problems with current Christian Bible engagement, says Glen Paauw, the senior director of content at the Institute For Bible Reading. “It’s so tempting to read the Bible as if it were written directly to us, in our situation, skip the parts that are about other people in other places, and find the little pieces that seem to speak directly to me today without any mediation,” said Paauw. “A museum experience like this has the potential to widely open our eyes to the fact that the Bible is immersed in real, ancient history, but it’s very different than ours.” Christians should be encouraged by the museum putting the Scriptures in context, says Paauw. “The very first step to great Bible engagement is understanding the Bible in its own world and on its own terms,” he added. Paauw joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen on Quick to Listen to discuss what it means to “engage” the Bible rather than “read” it, the role that Bible-related experiences play in our understanding and delighting in the Word of God, and what makes museums special. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Editor’s note: This podcast makes reference to sexual assault. One of Hollywood’s biggest open secrets is now out in the world: heralded producer Harvey Weinstein’s notoriously long track record of sexual harassment against women. These revelations have sparked a national conversation about the relationship between men and women in the workplace, and the prevalence of sexual assault, harassment, and unwanted attention. Regardless of a workplace’s affiliation to faith, speaking out about colleagues’ bad behavior is challenging for most people, says Halee Gray Scott, the director of Denver Seminary’s Kaleo Project, who is currently writing a book exploring how men and women can work well collectively in ministry. The obstacles just manifest themselves in different ways. “I’ve worked in Christian organizations for 20 years and there is a tendency to think that everyone’s doing everything right,” said Gray Scott. “[Everyone believes that] everyone’s trying to do the godly thing. … You end up having that discretion moment where you ask, ‘Is something going wrong? I’m not sure that it is. It can’t possibly be.’” On the other hand, there may be a broader acceptance of questionable behavior at a non-religious company, she says. “In secular organizations, there is a tendency to accept a certain level of sexual impropriety as flirting or goofing off or someone having a good time,” said Gray Scott. Gray Scott joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the difference between enabling and showing discretion, why culture cares more about sexual harassment than in decades past, and how the Billy Graham rule fits into this discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Several weeks after Lecrae dropped his latest album, the biggest name in Christian hip-hop joined the podcast Truth’s Table. The topic of conversation: the rapper’s musical and personal transformation since his last album, a three-year period during which Lecrae become increasingly vocal in speaking up about racial injustice. Listen here In response to a question about whether he “divorced white evangelicalism,” he said: I spoke out very frequently throughout 2016 in many different ways and it affected me. I went from a show that may have had 3,000 there to 300 but that was the cost. But those 300 people were people who I knew loved Lecrae, the black man, the Christian, all of who Lecrae was, not the caricature that had been drawn up for them. Lecrae’s decision to distance himself from evangelicalism is personally familiar to Carl Ellis Jr., a senior fellow at the African American Leadership Institute and a professor at Reformed Theological Seminary, who doesn’t consider himself reflected in the movement. “I cannot identify with much of what evangelicalism identifies with,” Ellis said. “Yes I believe Scripture to be the inerrant, inspired, infallible Word of God and all of that, but on the other hand, there’s so much baggage that goes along with it.” Like Lecrae, another obstacle for Ellis in connecting with the movement was its lack of emphasis on justice issues. “I was very active in the civil rights movement,” said Ellis, who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. “But when I got saved, I somehow got the subliminal message that I had to leave all of that behind. I think Lecrae was picking up on the fact that there’s something wrong here.” Ellis joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the genesis of Lecrae and John Piper’s relationship, what it means when someone stops identifying as evangelical, and what Lecrae’s actions and words suggest about where the church is on issues of racial justice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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David Uth learned about the Pulse nightclub massacre after he woke up and saw the news push-notifications on his phone. “I sat down on the side of the bed and I said, “Lord, help me and help us to look like you right now,’” said Uth, the pastor of the 16,000-person First Baptist Orlando. “I knew anger was my first feeling.” With no playbook about how to respond to a tragedy of this scale, Uth reached out to other megachurch leaders. First Baptist opened their doors for a prayer vigil that was attended by the governor and mayor. Uth told his congregation to actively solicit the victims’ needs so that the church could assist with them. “We need to go out there and find out as many needs as we can,” Uth told them. This week, Uth spoke with a friend of his who pastors a church in Las Vegas, a community currently grieving the mass shooting that left 59 dead. “He asked me, ‘What do we need to do?’” said Uth. “I was thankful to give help and guidance. Immediately, we sent him $10,000 overnight because I said, ‘You’re going to run into needs that you never dreamed you would run into. I want you to be able to do it without thinking about your budget.’” Uth joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss how the Orlando massacre changed his approach to ministry, how the tragedy changed his church’s relationship with the LGBT community, and the lasting trauma his community still suffers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Has one of the biggest trends in evangelical churches been eclipsed by a new one? Multisite congregations number more than 5,000 and researchers say this trend is as ubiquitous as the megachurch movement was 20 years ago. The Village Church, one of Texas’ largest multisite congregations, announced this week that it would be transitioning into five distinct congregations over the next five years. This news comes several years after its Denton location became an independent congregation “In part, Denton leaders and members didn’t want to build their strategy on the Matt Chandler brand,” CT reported in 2015. What’s been the key to this inaugural site’s success? “It’s because the people in that congregation have said that although this campus pastor hasn’t been preaching every week, this campus pastor has done our weddings, funerals ... is doing our shepherding, leading our staff, and in our neighborhood,” said Daniel Im, the author of Planting Missional Churches. “Yes we hear this really fantastic preacher Matt Chandler very often but what actually ties the church together?” Im joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the genesis of the multisite movement, what can make this model challenging to sustain, and the latest trend in churches that may not be on most Christians’ radar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Earlier this week, accusations that five Wheaton College football players had brutally hazed their teammate made national headlines. This news marked the biggest football scandal at a Christian school since five Baylor University players received charges of rape and assault. (The incident also led to the removal of Baylor president Ken Starr and head coach Art Briles and the resignation of athletic director Ian McCaw.) While details of the Wheaton case continue to emerge, football’s unique impact on Christian college campuses can’t be denied, said Dan Wood, the executive director of the National Christian College Athletic Association (NCCAA). “Football leads. If it’s a Christian college, I will tell you it’s the primary sport,” he said. Football is the most physical sport most colleges offer and its position as a fall sport means that athletes often return earlier than other students, a period that reaffirms their status as the center of the campus life, he said. “Football brings a different culture,” said Wood, who cautions Christian colleges before they add football programs. “We are putting [athletes] on pedestals,” Wood said. “Sometimes that’s our fault. Sometimes that’s their fault. But nonetheless, that’s where we find them way too often on the Christian campus.” Wood joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss whether Christian schools have different student-athlete environments than their secular counterparts, the purpose of the NCCAA, and if sports build character—or only reveal it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Houses of worship and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, otherwise known as FEMA, are at odds—after Hurricane Harvey. From CT’s report: Three Texas churches impacted by Hurricane Harvey sued FEMA this week for deeming them ineligible for disaster relief grants. The agency’s policy excludes sanctuaries that serve as shelters after natural disasters. Conflicts between FEMA and houses of worship aren’t new. In 1995, there was a debate over whether churches could use federal aid to repair damage from the Oklahoma City bombing. (Congress passed a law saying yes, they can.) In 2002, the Justice Department said Seattle churches were eligible for earthquake aid. In 2013, the House voted overwhelmingly to say churches can get FEMA funds for Hurricane Sandy but the bill ultimately died in the Senate. Part of the reason why there’s been no federal statute solution is that there isn’t always political urgency around the issue, said Chelsea Langston Bombino, the director of strategic engagement for the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance at the Center for Public Justice. “I would love to see the broader nonprofit community say, ‘We don’t all have to agree on our mission. We live in a diverse society, and we need diverse organizations to meet the needs of that society,’” she said. There are more than 350,000 congregations in the United States contributing economically to their communities and offering architectural and artistic value to their neighbors, and the majority offer services for people beyond their congregations, Langston Bombino said. “To restore a community you have to restore its institutions in which that community lives their lives,” she said. “That would include small business, non-profits, community centers, and houses of worship.” Langston Bombino joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen this week to discuss why FEMA’s denial of funds is a religious freedom issue, why a recent Supreme Court case could be important on the court’s ruling, and how we can love our neighbors through politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Just over 100 years ago, churches and labor unions had a close relationship. From a Christian History piece: Some labor unions gathered members in their halls and marched together to church to hear the special messages. Newspapers reprinted the sermons the next day, and ministers were invited to address workers at their shops. These events brought together people who did not often mingle. "Both sides discovered that each had been misunderstanding the other," [Presbyterian minister Charles] Stelzle wrote. "Many a preacher, in his study, preparatory to the service, got a new vision of what the labor movement stands for; and many a workingman, listening to his Labor Day address, caught a glimpse of the purpose of the Church, which he had never dreamed of." Despite this once close relationship with labor, most current thinking around theology and work focuses on white-collar Christians and leaves out the majority of Christian workers. “When we begin to think of faith/work integration, who has more time to think about that?” said Kent Duncan, who wrote his master’s thesis on blue-collar work and vocation. “Who is it that’s more likely to ponder abstract concepts about faith and work?” Duncan, who pastors a church that is predominantly blue collar, says that this population has “often not given a lot of thought to their vocational choices.” Regardless of type of work, however, everyone needs more than “just showing up on Sunday singing hymns, declaring truth, offering up prayers,” he said. “[We need to know that] what we do on Monday through Friday all matters to God.” Duncan joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the limitations of the current theology of work conversation, the spiritual needs of blue-collar workers, and how pastors can best lead professionally diverse congregations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You’ve probably seen the video, images, and numbers conveying the magnitude of Harvey, the storm that’s flooded large parts of Houston over the past week and has continued to pour as it heads east. As the city waits for the water to recede, disaster relief organizations have begun deploying their staff and volunteers to America’s fourth largest city. The destruction caused by Harvey is overwhelming, even to longtime Samaritan’s Purse employee Tim Haas. “I know even with all the resources that Samaritan’s Purse (SP) has, we can’t touch the enormity of what’s out there,” said Haas, who serves as SP’s manager of US disaster relief. Because of that, serving a community after a disaster often relies on volunteers drawing close to their faith. “God opens doors and we walk through them, many times not knowing the full impact of what we’re going to face but other times understanding this is our opportunity, this is our time to rally the churches, this is our time to be a beacon, and this is our time to minister,” he said. Haas joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss what SP does once weather forecasters have identified a storm, the role faith plays in the work they do, and whether people should bring their own boats and trucks without contacting ministries first. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The United States’ colleges and universities rest in the middle of some of the country’s most contentious conversations. Whether it’s race, freedom of speech, religious freedom or student loans, universities have plenty to wrestle with. Christian higher education is no exception. Much of the frustration for those seeking solutions to these issues is knowing how to speak to each other, says Shirley Hoogstra serves as the president of Council of Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). “Today, we are not as equipped to work with difference. Sometimes we want to shutdown difference. Sometimes we want to demonize difference,” said Hoogstra. In times when dialogue is a challenge, Christian colleges have done a good job of welcoming different viewpoints, even those they adamantly disagree with, and responding civilly to these perspectives, she said. “Just like we want the government to be committed to this freedom of speech and freedom of association for religious concepts, beliefs, and values, Christians have to be concerned about beliefs, values, and commitments they may not agree with either and model this sort of convicted civility...that makes America this great democracy that is still a beacon to the world.” Hoogstra joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the tensions of online education, how one CCCU school president made peace with a prominant LGBTQ state legislator, and why Christian colleges have a leg up on their secular counterparts when discussing race. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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President Donald Trump’s campaign coincided with the increasing mainstream awareness of the alt-right, a group which has gained recent national attention after it organized an ultimately violent protest in Charlottesville last weekend. But while public name recognition of this group has increased in the past two years, the full extent of their breadth and popularity are not always clear. For starters, one important way this group differs from previous far-right movements is their relationship with Christianity. “The alt-right is now mostly ignoring the religious question,” said George Hawley, the author of the forthcoming book, Making Sense of the Alt-Right. “That sets it apart from earlier far-right movements. Obviously, the KKK presented itself as an explicitly Protestant movement…The alt-right seems to be of the view that Christianity is becoming marginally irrelevant, at least in American politics, and as such it seems to be largely avoiding the subject.” Hawley joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli on Quick to Listen this week to discuss the true influence and popularity of this community, its connection—or lack thereof—with Christianity, and what role the church could play in fighting its message. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Founded less than 70 years ago, today World Vision is one the largest nonprofits in America. But its work primarily focuses outside of the US. Throughout its history, the organization has helped Vietnamese refugees, those devastated by the Ethiopian famine, the African AIDS crisis, and those affected by the Syrian civil war. Its sponsor child program assists one million children, in addition to the millions reached by its community health, microlending, and clean water work. In recent years, due to a combination of economic development and humanitarian work, more and more people around the globe have emerged out of poverty. But those left behind are increasingly those who live in countries marred by incompetent governments or corrupt regimes, says Richard Stearns, who is currently serving his 20th year as president of World Vision. “There’s kind of a conundrum that we face,” said Stearns. “Countries that have all those human rights abuses and challenges happen to be the places where the most vulnerable people live so we tend to work in those places because we feel like God has called our organization to the most vulnerable.” Stearns joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss World Vision’s plan on how not to create dependency, how evangelism factors into their work, and what India’s decision to shutdown Compassion International means for his organization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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A bill proposing to halve legal immigration and preference English speakers sparked outrage this week—nothing new for an issue that has long been a hot topic in the United States. (The current president made building a wall a key campaign promise.) As our country continues to debate immigration, millions of relative newcomers continue to build their lives here. Here’s how our recent story, “Immigrants Are Reshaping American Missions” sees it: "To some experts, these immigrant-led efforts look like the future of missions. They are informal and highly relational, operating outside legacy missions structures. They are, to a degree, an extreme version of mainstream evangelical mission projects." While these efforts are altering how we understand missions in this country, they’re also challenging perceptions that natives have about immigrants. “There’s a prevalent narrative in the United States that the immigrant community is perpetually in need of help or legislative protection. There’s certainly truth to that but there’s another part of the story,” said Andy Olsen, the author of the story and CT’s print managing editor. “Immigrant Christians in many of these communities are doing some amazing things, and there is robust ministry happening,” he said. “In some ways, if there’s a case to be made for supporting these communities, it might not be because we need to protect them as victims. It might be because God is doing some pretty transformative things through them and as the church this may be something that we should be paying attention to.” Olsen joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to explain the conditions that have made this transformation possible, how the United States’ political decisions about immigration affect ministry, and what legacy missions organizations can learn from these efforts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Earlier this month, a debate long familiar within the Christian hip-hop (CHH) community resurfaced when rapper Shai Linne released "Still Jesus." Throughout the album Linne suggests that CHH musicians whose tracks focus less explicitly on Jesus and who now professionally or personally associate with secular artists could be risking the integrity of the community. CHH musicians have the freedom to change the focus of their music, says DJ Cut No Slack, a former member of early CHH group I.D.O.L. King. For those who say, “‘Hey, I don’t want to be called Christian MC anymore.’ Okay, well why? That would be a question I’d have,” said Slack. “Why don’t you? I think there needs to be a real answer or clarification as to why you don’t want to be, especially since you came out that way, and I’ve been following you for years and now you want to switch. But guess what? You have the right to change your mind.” Part of that means that fans must be willing to let their favorite artists change. “On the church’s side, we have to make space for people to be who they are and change because they are not mandated in Scripture that everything you did in artistic form must proclaim the birth and resurrection of Jesus,” he said. Slack joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss the historical context of Linne’s critique, what fans and MCs owe each other, and what Christians without a public artistic presence can learn from the controversy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We’ve hit the 20-year anniversary of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, a book that’s provoked a reaction through the decades for its take on young romantic relationships. Back in 2001, one author wrote for CT, “Joshua Harris hasn't made my life any easier. In fact, thanks to him, my future wife—wherever she is— may very well have given up the idea of ever dating.” This author wasn’t the only one questioning the book’s advice on dating, sex, and love—over the next two decades, a number of people influenced by the book began to push back. Today, Harris is a former megachurch pastor enrolled in seminary and is currently reconsidering some of the book’s arguments and perspectives. Harris has begun engaging his critics and is trying to raise money to film a documentary about the book’s negative feedback. “I’ve wanted to move on from this book for some time, but I’m trying to talk to people who are sharing stories with me about ways the book really hurt them and damaged them. It’s partly for my own sense of closure to come back and reevaluate it and even to admit ways that I have now changed in my thinking,” Harris said. Harris joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss the consequences of ideas, the arguments in I Kissed Dating Goodbye that he still finds appealing, and whether he’d recommend the book today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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A day after an interview where Eugene Peterson stated that he supported same-sex marriage was released, the creator of The Message Bible retracted his statements. Quick to Listen host Morgan Lee speaks with online managing editor Richard Clark and online associate editor Kate Shellnutt about what's new, what's known, and what's still up in the air. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Kevin Miller didn’t see Eugene Peterson’s support for same-sex marriage coming. Miller, pastor of the Anglican congregation Church of the Savior, has read Peterson’s 30 works, visited him at his congregation and home, interviewed him multiple times, and considers the creator of The Message Bible paraphrase a personal hero. But Miller, former editor at Leadership Journal, wasn’t expecting Peterson to tell writer Jonathan Merritt that he would be willing to marry a same-sex couple if asked. “Eugene has written so beautifully in his Spiritual Theology series about how we listen to the word,” said Miller. “He is a writer who engages Scripture at some of the deepest listening levels and he is prophetic in his gift and temperament as well as pastoral. To invoke the culture shift as though the culture shift has anything to say to us as a church, I was just like ‘Eugene, that’s not what you taught us to discern theses kind of issues!’” Miller joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editorial director (and guest host) Ted Olsen to discuss the tension of learning from theologians after they’ve changed their convictions, the hallmarks of Peterson’s ministry, and what it means for the future of reading The Message. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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What’s summer without a sinking your teeth into a good book? This week on Quick to Listen, assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli talk about what they’ve been reading.

Full list below:

• White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America – Joan C. Williams • Unfamiliar Fishes – Sarah Vowell • Death Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather • Euphoria – Lily King • Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City – Matthew Desmond • The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert : An English Professor's Journey into Christian Faith – Rosaria Butterfield Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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June has been quite the month for Iraqi Christians in America. From CT’s report: "More than 100 Iraqi Christians arrested in immigration raids earlier this month will get to stay in the United States—at least for another two weeks, according to an order issued yesterday by a federal judge in Detroit." Of the more than 1,000 Iraqis who live in America, 300 of them were Christians slated to be deported later this summer, a move which provoked significant outcry from the community. “This is about the conditions we are sending people back to. We are imposing a death penalty through the back door,” said the lawyer of one of those affected. This news came just weeks after Vice President Mike Pence attended an event highlighting the plight of persecuted Christians. Pence also hosted the top leaders from churches in Iraq and Syria. “Mike Pence been really outspoken in support of our community. We couldn’t really ask anything better from the vice president,” said Martin Manna, the president of the Chaldean Chamber and Foundation in Detroit, Michigan. Finding a political home has been challenging for the Iraqi Christian American diaspora, said Manna. The community was frustrated at George W. Bush for invading Iraq but also blamed Barack Obama for not responding urgently enough to ISIS, which has terrorized Christians in their homeland. While President Trump promised to protect them, his administration has moved to deport Iraqi Christians in America. “It’s a very conservative community. It’s always faith first and family,” said Manna. “… Republicans—while they appreciate our Christian beliefs and they fight for us when we talk about the persecution of Christians—when you talk about immigration they seem to shut down. On the other side, when you talk to Democrats, they want to rally around social justice and immigration reform but when we talk about the persecution of Christians, it goes to a deaf ear.” Manna recently joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss why Iraqi Christians originally immigrated to America, why longtime members of the community are at risk of deportation, and what their relationship with Arab Muslims looks like in their new country. Listeners may also want to check out Quick to Listen, Episode 27, which discussed why so few Syrian refugees have been Christians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Here’s how Quick to Listen producer Richard Clark introduced this podcast last year: I’ve been fascinated by the potential of podcasts because I see them as an opportunity for listeners to opt-in to become part of a captive, actively listening audience. Podcasts provide us with opportunities for active listening, a chance to hear multiple perspectives on a subject without the temptation to click away or draw conclusions too soon. … Quick to Listen is about giving ourselves the opportunity to hear, really hear, one another. Our hope is, at the end of each episode, we might be one step closer to the truth of these complex situations. So taking in arguments, learning from experts, and gathering broader context has been part of our master plan at Quick to Listen since its inception. Hopefully your participation in this practice goes beyond our weekly podcasts. This month, CT published a piece entitled “Why We Argue Best with Our Mouths Shut.” As author Christine Herman wrote: If it seems obvious that arguing is not an effective way to win someone over, it doesn’t stop people from trying. From Facebook to family gatherings, our disagreements regularly erupt into arguments. … If we have any hope for healing the divisions in our society, families, churches, and communities, it will serve us well to learn how to have better conversations. Herman recently joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss what listening is and is not, why people feel loved when you ask them questions, and why changing your mind can be such a big deal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Christians were left scratching their heads about Bernie Sanders’s grasp of their theology at a political hearing last week. Last year, Wheaton alumnus Russell Vought, President Donald Trump’s pick for deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, had written about his own faith last year after a professor at his alma mater was suspended for beliefs about Islam. Drawing on Vought’s statement, Sanders accused Vought of being Islamophobic and making statements that were “indefensible” and “hateful” and challenged his conviction that salvation was secured through Christ alone. “I don’t know how many Muslims there are in America. I really don’t know, probably a couple million. Are you suggesting that all of those people stand condemned? What about Jews? Do they stand condemned too?” said Sanders, a secular Jew. While some suggested that Sanders’s statements were essentially a religious test, John Inazu, the author of Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference, wasn’t so sure. “On the charitable reading of this, it’s important to ask nominees questions about whether they are going to treat people of different religions fairly or not,” said Inazu, a professor at Washington University School of Law. Sanders’s comments raise questions about what Christians expect non-Christians to know about the fundamentals of their faith and how they should express the nuances of their theology to an increasingly pluralistic and non-religious country. “It was a reminder that baseline level of knowledge is not that deep when it comes to more elite members of the Democratic Party and also other members of society,” Inazu said. Inazu joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss if Sanders’s questions pose a future significant religious liberty issue, how Christians should communicate their beliefs to the public, and the extent to which we should assume that the public is eavesdropping on our conversations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Terrorism will likely be a constant part of the news cycle for the foreseeable future. Less than two weeks after a suicide bomber killed himself and more than two dozen others at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, terrorists showed up in London. Last Saturday, three men killed seven people and wounded 48 others after driving a vehicle into a crowd on London Bridge, exiting the vehicle, and proceeding to stab people. This month, the United States will sadly remember the one year anniversary of the Pulse Nightclub attacks, where a gunman killed 49 people in Orlando. Despite the rise of headlines about terrorism in recent years, these attacks on civilians aren’t new. In fact, we can find references to these types of atrocities throughout the Old Testament. What’s more, they’re often wrestled with at a visceral level in the largest book of the Bible. “One of the biggest issues in Psalms is warfare and the threat of violence from enemies,” said Tremper Longman, the author of How to Read the Psalms. In particular, the writers of the Psalms wrestle with their feelings of vindictiveness toward their enemies and desire of justice from God. At times, they even implore God to cause horror to befall their foes. However, there is one key distinction about imprecatory prayers that Christians sometimes miss, said Longman. “The psalmist isn’t saying ‘Give me the opportunity and resources and I will kill my enemies,’” he said. “What he’s doing is turning his anger over to God and saying ‘God you take vengeance against my enemies.’ … You’re taking your anger and fear to God, and you’re expressing hope that God will answer you.” Longman joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli on Quick to Listen to discuss whether the Bible ever justifies revenge, what the Psalms teach us about dealing with our feelings of helplessness in the face of terrorism, and how Christians can offer hope to their loved ones who do not believe in God. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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When it comes to the relationship status between American Christians and Muslims, it’s complicated. But that relational gap is a chasm that Dallas pastor Bob Roberts has committed to bridging. For years, Roberts, who leads Northwood Church, has led pastor-iman retreats, taken local clerics on hunting trips, and built relationships with Saudi royalty, even in the face of opposition in his own community. “Sadly, one evangelical pastor gets up in the pulpit—he has a pretty big audience—and yells ‘Muhammed was a pedophile,’” said Roberts. “Boy, that’s really going to make Muslims want to follow Jesus. … It may be good for his politics, but it’s lousy for someone who wants people to be open about the Jesus of the New Testament.” Roberts has never been quiet about his faith. He has shared about Jesus on stage an annual gathering on Islam before thousands of young people, or what he jokingly calls the “Muslim Passion Conference,” and discussed it during iftar gatherings during Ramadan. He also asks Muslims plenty of questions about their own faith. “Sometimes we have to understand that witnessing is listening as much as it is talking,” said Roberts. Roberts joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss what it looks like for evangelicals to love their Muslim neighbors well, how Americans can better educate themselves about Islam, and the opportunity of Ramadan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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A couple weeks before President Trump fired James Comey, we learned that the then-FBI director was an admirer of 20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Thanks to sleuthing by Gizmodo, we learned that Comey’s Twitter display name was named after the father of Christian realism and that he had written his college thesis juxtaposing Niebuhr and Jerry Falwell. A recent article at CT made a case for how Comey’s recent actions may have been influenced by the theologian: "A Christian has an obligation to seek justice, the theologian argued, and this means entering the political sphere because that is the realm where one can find the power necessary to establish whatever justice is possible in the world. Comey’s decision to work for the FBI can be understood as a way of fulfilling Niebuhr’s vision of Christianity as a defender of justice." Comey’s not the only recent public figure influenced by the late theologian, whose admirers include people on the left and right, including Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, John McCain, and David Brooks. But what shaped Niebuhr’s worldview? “You really can’t understand Niebuhr’s political theology unless you appreciate the fact that his life was really bracketed by war,” said Joseph Loconte, a history professor at The King’s College in New York City. Niebuhr was a young man during World War I and had come into his own as a “Christian Protestant public intellectual” just prior to World War II, a period in which he embraced pacifism and socialism. As totalitarian socialism and fascism took off in the 1930s, “what had become settled beliefs for him, now they’re being upended by the realities in which he finds himself,” Loconte said. Niebuhr himself admitted that his ideas shifted not as the result of “study, but the pressure of world events,” Loonte said. Loconte joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli to discuss what Niebuhr’s theology does and does not justify, what America’s foreign policy decisions on Iraq and Syria look like through a Niebuhrian lens, and what happens when people with good intentions make decisions with unintended consequences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Since assuming office, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has shown little interest in expanding the efforts of his predecessors in curbing policies that criminal justice reform advocates blame for America’s high rates of mass incarceration. Instead, he’s doubled down, recently instructing federal prosecutors to pursue the harshest penalties for drug dealers and gun violence offenders. (Read his memo.) Sessions’ intentions are discouraging news for those who have long pressed for reform, a group which includes Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship. They also present an opportunity for Christians to speak into America’s anti-drug policy, one of the “biggest catastrophic failures in American history, says Craig DeRoche, Prison Fellowship’s senior vice president of advocacy and public policy. Christians ought to get “involved because our values are are at stake and a lot of human lives that God cares about...are at stake,” said DeRoche. “This is an invitation for Christians to engage.” DeRoche joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss the good intentions behind mandatory minimums, what the Old Testament has to say to our current legal climate, and how Prison Fellowship ended up partnering with the NAACP and ACLU to support previously incarcerated people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last week, President Trump issued an executive order. From CT’s coverage: The order entitled “Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty” professes to extend political speech protections for pastors and religious organizations, aiming to let them talk about politics without penalty. The executive order’s key feature: fulfilling a Trump campaign promise to end the Johnson Amendment, legislation that has discouraged non-profits, including churches, from endorsing political candidates for six decades. (Despite Trump’s claims that many wanted this relief, research from last year didn’t support this statement.) While most non-profits and churches have refrained from explicit endorsements, the IRS has largely taken a hands-off role in enforcing the law. “The IRS usually has not enforced the provision,” said Thomas Berg, a religious liberty scholar. So what keeps the government silent? While it makes sense that the government would want a check on “powerful, tax-exempt organizations using the benefit of tax-exemption to toss the election one way or another with big money,” the IRS would quickly run into First Amendment issues if it actually tried to stop churches, said Berg. Pastors could get in trouble for telling their congregations “I think really the only candidate who meets the moral test is this one,” said Berg. The problem is that “you can violate the provision with less explicit statements than that.” Berg joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor-in-chief Mark Galli to discuss how The Christian Century lost its tax-exempt status, the case for churches to pay taxes, and the best way for pastors to shepherd their congregation on the issue of politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last week, CT Women asked “Who’s In Charge of the Christian Blogosphere?” Author Tish Harrison Warren writes: "The rise of the blogosphere in the early 2000s yielded the genre of the 'spiritual blogger.' From the comfort of their living rooms, lay people suddenly became household names, wielding influence over tens of thousands of followers. A new kind of Christian celebrity—and authority—was born: the speaker and author who comes to us (often virtually) as a seemingly autonomous voice, disembedded from any larger institution or ecclesial structure." One daughter of this phenomena was Her.meneutics, a Christianity Today blog specifically centering the voices of women writers, which ran until last year. Washington Post religion reporter and Acts of Faith editor Sarah Pulliam Bailey was a co-founder. Around the time she joined CT, she read a profile about a Mormon “mommy blogger,” which presented this new group of female writers as a phenomenon. “There are these religious bloggers, and they’re … writing about depression and motherhood and really serious issues connected to motherhood,” Pulliam Bailey said. She realized how much this content resonated with readers and how beneficial creating a similar space for evangelical women could be for this under-targeted group. Out of that came Her.meneutics. So how did Her.meneuetics legitimize its writers? Pulliam Bailey joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and guest host and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss this challenge, the days when you could read the entire Christian blogosphere, and what local church oversight over spiritual teachers can practically look like. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Move over Fitbits and Apple Watches. Technology is coming with radical implications for our physical bodies this century. “The next frontier, the next real step-change in human history, is biological,” said author Andy Crouch in an interview with CT last week. “The next ‘easy everywhere’ in the 21st century is about permanently modifying the conditions of human embodiment.” Crouch’s prediction isn’t new. In fact, CT ran a major story announcing the upcoming arrival of the “techno sapiens” back in 2004. But for the most part, most Christians have paid scant attention to the implications of this technological revolution—and of the transhumanist ideology parallel to it, says Douglas Estes, a theology professor at South University with a lifelong interest in science. “It seems to me that the biggest misunderstanding of Christians for transhumanism is that they think that it’s just science fiction, that’s it’s some crazed scientist idea that is never going to happen.” said Estes, pointing to Captain America as an example. “I think that dismissing this issue would be a huge mistake for us because it would not allow Christians to engage in this issue.” Estes joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor-in-chief Mark Galli on Quick to Listen to discuss just how fast technology is changing, why Christians may be willing to genetically modify their children, and the best way to understand transhumanism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last week, the radio personality many Christians know as “The Bible Answer Man” announced his conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy. From CT’s report: Last Sunday, 67-year-old Hank Hanegraaff and his wife entered into Orthodox Christianity at St. Niktarios Greek Orthodox Church in Charlotte, North Carolina. The former Protestant is well known among evangelicals as The Bible Answer Man. Since 1989, Hanegraaff has been answering questions on Christianity, denominations, and the Bible on a nationally syndicated radio broadcast. A champion of evangelical Christianity, he’s best known for arguing against cults, heresies, and non-Christian religions. Hankegraaff’s conversion didn’t surprise James Stamoolis, the author of Eastern Orthodox Mission Theology Today, who has previously written on why evangelicals are attracted to this older iteration of Christianity. Stamloois points to Orthodoxy’s highly sensory services which include both incense and icons, as well as “the whole idea of authority.” “I know a lot of people who have converted from Protestantism to Catholicism and Orthodoxy because it’s fixed. It’s settled. 'We don’t have women priests. We’re never going to have women priests,'” said Stamoolis, who grew up in the Orthodox tradition but now identifies as a “card-carrying evangelical.” Ironically, Orthodoxy’s association with tradition came after the church proved to be highly successful at contextualizing across different cultures, says Stamoolis. “A lot of it has to do with their theological methodology,” he said. “[They] were successful and imbued so much in the culture.” Stamoolis joined Morgan and Mark on Quick to Listen this week to discuss why there are so many different Orthodox traditions, the theological underpinnings of theosis, and what Christianity is like without the theological ideas of Aquinas and Augustine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Perhaps no group can take more credit for Donald Trump’s victory than the 81 percent of self-identified white evangelicals who elected him into office last November. Following an inauguration that featured evangelical leaders Franklin Graham and Sam Rodriguez, Trump has named evangelicals to more than half of his cabinet positions and fulfilled a key campaign promise with the arrival of Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court. Yet, for Trump’s white evangelical critics, concerns about his treatment of refugees and immigrants, among others, have persisted. Many are also worried about white evangelicalism’s witness to both fellow Americans and evangelicals of color. Earlier this week, Quick to Listen co-host and CT editor-in-chief Mark Galli led a discussion with three evangelical leaders to discuss their collective opposition to Trump during the election and how they understood the state of the evangelical movement now. Dan Darling, the vice president of communications for the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Katelyn Beaty, former Quick to Listen co-host and CT’s print managing editor, and Julie Roys, host of the national talk show Up For Debate on the Moody Radio Network joined Galli on the stage at the Evangelical Press Association’s annual convention in Lombard, Illinois. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last year, the government passed a number of laws making it harder to share one’s faith. The legislation required missionaries to have permits, made house churches illegal, and limited religious activity to registered church buildings, effectively restricting Christians from evangelizing outside of their churches. (The jury’s still out on whether the legislation will hold up in court.) Earlier this year, the Russian government took another step in its decade-long crackdown against Jehovah’s Witnesses. From CT’s report: The Justice Ministry submitted a Supreme Court case to label the Jehovah’s Witnesses headquarters an extremist group. This would allow Russia to enact a countrywide ban on its activity, dissolving its organization and criminalizing its worship. The ban would impact about 175,000 followers in 2,000 congregations nationwide. “Without any exaggeration, it would put us back to the dark days of persecution for faith.” Jehovah’s Witnesses make up a tiny percentage of the country’s population--but their unpopularity has made it awkward for Russian Protestants who “don’t consider themselves as extreme—or as annoying—as the Witnesses, and they aren’t too eager to speak out against the recent case against them.” One key group contributing to this complicated environment is the Russian Orthodox Church which staunchly believes that faith should have a “robust communal dimension,” — not confined to a private relationship between a person and God, says Andrey Shirin, who moved to the US from Russia more than 25 years ago and currently works as an assistant professor of divinity at John Leland Center for Theological Studies. “The notion that people should be free to exercise their faith or not to exercise any is really uncontroversial,” said Shirin. “It all depends on how this is interpreted.” Shirin joined Morgan and Mark this week on Quick to Listen discuss Putin’s popularity among American evangelicals, whether the country’s evangelicals should be concerned about their future, and how the Orthodox Church kept its credibility after the Communist era. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Since the beginning of the year, more than 800 congregations in 30 American cities have joined the New Sanctuary Movement (NSM). An interfaith effort organized by Christian activist Alexia Salvatierra, NSM religious institutions have pledged to open their doors to undocumented immigrants worried that authorities may arrest them or separate their families. (Read CT’s interview with Salvatierra.) At this point, most of the churches that have joined the New Sanctuary Movement are progressive congregations. New Season Christian Worship Center in Sacramento is one of the few evangelical congregations that’s announced something similar, what Time Magazine recently called a “safe haven” program. The program is specifically focused on meeting the urgent needs of undocumented immigrants, those fleeing domestic violence, or those affected by gang fights. So far, New Season has set up more than two dozen beds for congregants looking to escape immigration raids and hosted more than half a dozen families. “A safe haven is a place where we can offer a place of rest from turmoil from those things which are troubling people,” said Charlie Rivera, who pastors New Season’s Spanish language ministry and leads the safe haven program. “We offer a sense of hope and spiritual help.” The church’s program is not meant to oppose or thwart the government, said Rivera. “We’re not here to break any law or do anything illegal,” he said. “Our main goal is to assist people who are in need.” Rivera joined Morgan and Mark to discuss why he doesn’t believe his church is harboring criminals, why New Season has seen a surge of Hispanic attendees, and how Christians can encourage undocumented immigrants to do the right thing. (Note: New Season’s pastor, Sam Rodriguez, serves on CT’s board, and recently appeared on Quick to Listen to discuss his rationale for praying at Trump’s inauguration.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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In the past few months, life has suddenly gotten worse for dozens of South Korean missionaries ministering in China. From CT’s report: In the past few months, China has expelled dozens of South Korean missionaries from Jilin, a northeastern province that neighbors North Korea. News media reported the raids, with estimates of the total expulsions ranging from 30 to 70. “Chinese authorities raided the homes of the missionaries, citing a problem with their visas, and told them to leave,” one human rights activist and pastor told Agence France-Presse (AFP). He said that most were on tourist or student visas. The majority of South Korean missionaries working in China serve North Korean defectors who cross the border. There are at least 500 officially registered South Korean missionaries in China, though this number could be as high as 2,000. While missions took off in South Korea in the late 1970s—making the country the No. 2 missionary-sending country by 2006—its foreign presence has been on the decline in the last decade. In fact, 2017 marks 10 years since 23 South Korean church volunteers were abducted by the Taliban while traveling in Afghanistan on a medical aid trip. They were released 43 days later, but not before two of them were killed. The trauma caused by the event didn’t shake the South Korean church’s resolve on missions, said Julie Ma, a theology professor at Oral Roberts University. “Church leaders said they will still go forward with the gospel but with more caution and wisdom,” said Ma, one of the first South Korean missionaries in the Philippines. “I think this terrible experience taught the Korean church a lot of things.” Ma joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli on Quick to Listen to discuss the rise and decline of South Korean missions, the consequences of the 2007 Taliban hostage situation, and what led her to become a missionary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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According to Don Whitney, Professor of Biblical Spirituality, a biblical fast needs a purpose beyond hunger. Christians of a more liturgical bent are in the middle of the ascetic season of Lent, discipling those “desires of the flesh,” hopefully with a measure of cheerfulness. But you don’t have to have high regard for Lent, to appreciate the fact that Jesus didn’t merely command fasting, but instead just assumed his followers would fast. When talking about it in the Sermon on the Mount, for example, he began, “And when you fast.” Why does Jesus—and Piper, Bonhoeffer, and a host of witnesses--think fasting is a normal part of the life of faith? What difference does it really make? Then there is this: If we were to get good answers to those two questions, how exactly do you do it? What constitutes “fasting”? And how can one do it so that (a) it really does increase our hunger for God and (b) brings some cheer into our lives? According to Professor of Biblical Spirituality at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Don Whitney, fasting has a unique quality among the spiritual disciplines. “Unlike any of the other spiritual disciplines, we actually feel this one in our bodies.” It’s this trait that, according to Whitney, serves as a constant reminder of whatever purpose we set out to accomplish through out fast. Whitney joined editor in chief Mark Galli and guest-host, Online Managing Editor, Richard Clark on Quick to Listen to talk about about the reasons we should fast, pitfalls to avoid, and whether a fast from social media really counts as a genuine application of the ancient spiritual discipline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Did you hear the news about renowned evangelical pastor and author Tim Keller? From CT’s report: Later this year, Redeemer Presbyterian will no longer be a multisite megachurch in Manhattan, and Tim Keller will no longer be its senior pastor. Keller, 66, announced at all eight Sunday services today that he will be stepping down from the pulpit. The move corresponds with a decades-long plan to transition the single Presbyterian Church in America congregation—which has grown to 5,000 members since it began 28 years ago—into three particular churches. His last day as senior pastor will be July 1. This plan has been a long time in the making: The transition follows a vision plan Redeemer set in place back in 1997, and preparing Keller’s three successors—the pastors at each of the new particular churches—ended up as a helpful side effect. “This is not primarily a succession plan,” Kathy Keller said. “It is a vision for not being a megachurch.” Each of the three Redeemer churches will remain collegial and still partner together for programs, but will officially be their own congregations with their own leaders and elders (pending a May 20 congregational vote). They also each will plant churches in three more locations—resulting in nine total daughter churches. Keller has been “typically wise and humble” in how he carried out his pastoral succession, said Capitol Hill Baptist Church pastor and Keller friend Mark Dever. “This as a more constructive model than is often done where a large congregation is built very much around the personality of the preacher, and when that preacher’s gone the whole thing kind of dissolves,” said Dever. Dever joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli on Quick to Listen about whether pastors should fight against their church becoming a megachurch, why the senior pastor should share the pulpit, and if pastors should have a say in choosing their successors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last week, two-time Southern Baptist Convention president Jack Graham announced that his church would withhold its donation to the denomination’s Cooperative Program (CP). Southern Baptist churches decide individually whether to donate a percentage of their tithe to a common pot which funds state conventions, national denominational agencies, seminaries, and church planting and missions entities like the North American Mission Board and the International Mission Board. Less than two percent of the Cooperative Program’s budget funds the Southern Baptist national public policy arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, led by Russell Moore. But the 2016 election demonstrated that Graham and Moore were on separate political pages. In an interview earlier this month, Graham noted an “uneasiness” among church leaders about the “disconnect between some of our denominational leaders and our churches.” While initially a critic of Donald Trump, Graham later joined Trump’s list of faith advisors and penned several editorials explaining his support. Moore, on the other hand, consistently spoke out against Trump and at one point criticized his Religious Right supporters as defined by “the doctrinally vacuous resentment over a lost regime of nominal, cultural ‘Christian America.’” These critiques didn’t sit well with Graham. “There was a disrespectfulness towards Southern Baptists and other evangelical leaders, past and present,” Graham told The Wall Street Journal in an article about SBC pushback to Moore from December. But Graham insists that he’s “not angry at the SBC, and neither are our people.” “I’m not working to start a movement to fire anyone,” he said in an interview explaining his church’s decision from earlier this month. Graham more or less represents mainstream Southern Baptists, suggests Ed Stetzer, who has years of experience working in SBC entities. “Jack Graham is not a fringy character who is accustomed to throwing grenades from the sidelines,” said Stetzer. “…He is well-respected and a mentor to many pastors.” And while Southern Baptists are not always going to agree with every idea or strategy that their CP giving supports, “the goal of the ERLC is to represent Southern Baptists.” “The question is, what does that mean?” said Stetzer, who currently holds the Billy Graham Distinguished Chair for Church, Mission, and Evangelism at Wheaton College. Stetzer joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor in chief Mark Galli on Quick to Listen to discuss SBC unity in light of the election and how Christian conscience should direct giving to Christian institutions. (Note: since this recording, the SBC’s executive committee announced that it would be studying CP escrowing.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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For researchers to dub your congregation a multiethnic church, the body can’t include more than 80 percent of a given racial group. Today, only five percent of Protestant churches make this threshold. If we applied this same 80 percent metric to American denominations, few would be considered multiethnic. (Assemblies of God and the Seventh-day Adventist Church are key exceptions, according to 2015 Pew Research data.) This wouldn’t have necessarily been the case in colonial America. In fact, for decades, whites and blacks (some who were enslaved and others who were free) worshiped at the same churches—Methodist, Anglican, Presbyterian, and Baptist. Not all denominations’ equally reached enslaved people with their message, says Eric Washington, a history professor at Calvin College. The “stodgy” and “erudite” tradition of Anglicanism didn’t resonate as broadly—although former Methodist Absalom Jones was ordained as the first African American Episcopalian priest by the end of the 18th century. In contrast, many African slaves were drawn to Methodism’s theological emphasis on born-again conversions and total depravity and its preachers’ open-air, multiethnic services, says Washington. “[In Methodism,] there was no education requirement to be an exhorter or lay preacher,” said Washington, who is also the director of Calvin’s African and African Diaspora Studies. “So enslaved men who had a recognized gift to preach or exhort—they were encouraged in that.” But congregations began to split when denominations blocked African American men from taking on more official church leadership roles—or, in the case of the Methodists, when church leaders threw out several of their black church members for praying in the “wrong” part of the church. Washington joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor-in-chief Mark Galli on Quick to Listen to discuss the Great Awakening’s impact on African enslaved and free people, the overlap—if any—between conversion and emancipation, and the history of plantation churches. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Betsy DeVos is set to run the United States Department of Education after the Senate confirmed her appointment earlier this week. Many criticized DeVos’s nomination because she has little experience in public education. She attended a private school, and beyond mentoring in the public schools, she has never attended, taught, or sent children to public schools. A Christian, (DeVos has attended Rob Bell’s former church Mars Hill) her appointment has raised questions about Christian support for public schools. In short: Can Christians who homeschool or enroll their children in private school still support public schools? One’s familial education choices don’t affect the extent to which one can support public schools, says Andrea Reyes Ramirez, the executive director of the Faith and Education Coalition for the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. (Read Ramirez’s piece offering practical steps from earlier this week.) “At this point, we know that 90 percent of America’s children are in public schools so I think that as believers we need to engage and think afresh about our personal engagement with strengthening the public schools whether our children are at public schools or not,” she said. According to Ramirez, Christians who do opt for homeschooling or private schools should be conscientious of potential unintended consequences of their decisions. “We have to be cautious about being so focused on taking care of our own children that we isolate ourselves from the beautiful, made-in-God’s-image children in our community,” she said. “I think it’s a great discipleship opportunity for the children in our home, to connect the dots and say, ‘We’re thinking about what’s best for our family. We’re praying about how to school you, and in addition, we’re praying about how to make a difference in our community.’” Ramirez joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor-in-chief Mark Galli to discuss why 2017 is such a seminal year for public education, where she stands on the DeVos appointment, and how asking God to help her better use her brain helped her get through stats class. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This Sunday’s Super Bowl game is a classic good v. evil showdown. (Okay, maybe that’s editorializing. But it is true that the Patriots have won the Super Bowl 7 times since 2001 and the Atlanta Falcons have never even won a title, making the Falcons the inevitable favored underdog.) But beyond the actual teams, the Super Bowl stands atop a waning list of cultural events that bring America together. Last year, about 115 million Americans tuned in to watch the Broncos, the commercials, or Beyoncé. The fact that there’s something for everyone is one of the Super Bowl’s biggest value propositions, says David Prince, the author of In the Arena: The Promise of Sports for Christian Discipleship. “The commercials during the Super Bowl—it would be impossible for me to have less interest in that. And yet for some people, that’s the main reason they’re tuning in,” said Prince, an Atlanta Falcons fan. “The halftime show—I’ve never watched a halftime show in my life and I don’t plan to start this year—but for others that’s the main reason they’re watching.” Prince joined joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor-in-chief Mark Galli to discuss whether football be the country’s new civil religion, why losing can be important than winning, and why players’ faith isn’t covered better by the media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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So, fake news. In recent months, these two words have been used as a weapon by the president to discredit the media (e.g., CNN) or describe the fabrication of a bogus report on Clinton voter fraud. Fake news isn’t new—nearly a decade ago, people started sharing reports of Barack Obama’s alleged Muslim faith as fact. Further, Christians have at times been responsible for spreading these false reports. (“I think it’s really important for your readers to know that I have been a member of the same church for almost 20 years, and I have never practiced Islam,” Obama told CT back in 2008.) But at least one Christian can take credit for challenging the church and society to take the information age much more seriously. Twentieth century French Christian philosopher Jacques Ellul thought deeply about the impact of mainstream media. Ellul was particularly interested in the century’s obsession with efficiency, says Lisa Richmond, who recently translated his Presence in the Modern World from French. When this was concept was applied to communication, Ellul referred to it as a propaganda. “Propaganda, to Ellul, is a way of using language and images to accomplish a particular objective. It is the most effective way to achieve the outcome that you want to get,” said Richmond, paraphrasing Ellul. “Ellul would argue that for the propagandist, truth is simply a tool to be used when it is the most effective way to accomplish your goal. If it is not the most effective way, then you use falsehood.” Our society has largely learned to communicate within this framework, says Robinson. “Once propaganda is at work in society, it forces other people to engage propaganda,” she said. “That can be contrasted with an ethical true desire to communicate in which our hope is that we understand truth more fully. That’s not the objective of the propagandist. It is to accomplish a certain outcome. If truth serves that outcome, great. If not, discard it.” Robinson joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor-in-chief Mark Galli to discuss how propaganda gives us a sense of belonging, why Christians are complicit in our culture of information overload, and whether journalists can ever escape bias. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This Friday, Samuel Rodriguez will become the first Hispanic and Assemblies of God pastor to play a role in a presidential inauguration, in this case, the swearing in of Donald J. Trump. Rodriguez, the president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, and the pastor of a church in Sacramento, didn’t endorse either candidate during the campaign. He did meet with Trump last summer for “a very healthy discussion” of issues, including religious liberty and immigration. “We also talked about racial unity as it pertains to bringing the country together,” Rodriguez, who also serves on CT’s board, said in a statement. Despite the controversy that has followed Trump throughout his campaign and Rodriguez’s own disagreements with him on immigration, Rodriguez is committed to engaging with his presidency—a position he would take with almost any politician. “Are there any politicians I will not work with? Wow. It would require an extreme sort of agenda coming out of a politician, or rhetoric coming out of a politician, that would prompt me somehow to say, ‘I can’t work with this person,’” said Rodriguez, who has previously advised both Democrats and Republicans. “Something that is so derogatory. Something that is anatema to who we are as Christians.” Rodriguez joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor-in-chief Mark Galli to discuss why the church should not retreat from culture, what led 60 percent of Latino evangelicals to vote for Trump, and why Christians should register as independent voters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This week, Christian persecution advocacy group Open Doors announced its annual list of 50 countries where it’s hardest to be a Christian. At the top: North Korea, a country that has held the dubious distinction for 14 years. The majority of the countries are in the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. Here’s the full list. The list scores each country in terms in five quality-of-life areas and also looks at religiously motivated violence. For the third year in a row, the scores have gone up, suggesting that persecution against Christians has increased worldwide. American Christians could do so much more to help their vulnerable siblings in the faith, said David Curry, who serves as Open Doors USA’s president and CEO. “If I had the feeling that the American church, in all of my travels, was praying—​at least, praying for the persecuted believers—I would feel much better than I do,” said Curry. “I just don’t think that happens on a wide scale.” Curry joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor-in-chief Mark Galli to discuss drug cartel persecution in Mexico, what keeps North Korea on the top of the list, and American Christian apathy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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If you were too busy watching college football and the NFL this weekend, maybe you missed the craziest minute of sports since the Olympics. In her first fight back after a stunning 2015 defeat, acclaimed MMA fighter Ronda Rousey lost in 48 seconds. But should Christians watch this fight at all? What are we to think of female MMA fighting itself? And what does our culture’s embrace of female MMA fighting reveal about what it values and how it understands gender? These are the types of questions theologian Alastair Roberts raised in recent piece for The Gospel Coalition. “There’s a lot of celebration of the strong female character, whether that’s Laura Croft or Sydney Bristow. All of these characters represent an image of female strength that’s very much modeled after a model of male strength. As we celebrate these images, what is the actual consequence of this for women?” said Roberts, who is the author of the forthcoming Heirs Together: A Theology of the Sexes. “The more that we celebrate this sort of sport and image of female strength the more we are in danger of devaluing the sort of strength that the vast majority of women have which is a very distinct sort of strength which is not seen in pugilism or the sort of the violent conflict you see in the UFC ring.” Roberts joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor-in-chief Mark Galli this week to discuss whether the sex of the person fighting affects the morality of MMA, what it will take for culture to more broadly value feminine strength, and what the ministry of women is to the church. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This week, the three hosts of CT Podcasts got together to discuss their favorite things, and of course, to fight for favorite-thing supremacy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hey Protestants, how many of you know what the Feast of the Immaculate Conception celebrates? If you said Jesus, you’re wrong. Nope, this Catholic celebration honors the church doctrine that Mary was not tainted by original sin. If that belief makes your eyebrows arch, you may not be alone. Catholics, who traditionally venerate Mary much more than Protestants, have a host of beliefs that today we may see as extra-biblical. But that may be because Catholics’ understanding of the development of doctrine differs from Protestants, says Beeson Divinity School dean (and proud Southern Baptist) Timothy George. “Catholics would say, ‘Everything we believe about Mary is somehow or other rooted or grounded in something that’s in the Bible,’” said George. George doesn’t personally believe Catholic teaching on the immaculate conception, Mary’s perpetual virginity, or the idea she was assumed into heaven without physically dying—but he does think that Protestants should find a lot more to love about the mother of God. George joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor-in-chief Mark Galli this week to discuss how Mary models discipleship, what the reformers thought of her, and whether or not Protestants should pray to her. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Egypt’s Coptic Christians are in a state of mourning after a suicide bomber killed at least 25 people at a Cairo church on Sunday. “Egypt always tends to rally around Christians at moments like this,” said Jayson Casper, CT’s Middle East correspondent. “But over time, [ISIS is] trying to hammer and hammer and hammer the Christians in Egypt and put so much pressure on the internal government that it itself may collapse.” Even if the government does collapse, the Coptic Church “is equipped to deal with it,” said Casper. “They can say, ‘This has always happened to us in our history. It is how God has treated us and he perseveres with us through it.’” While the attack was the worst to target Copts since the 2011 New Year’s bombing of a church in Alexandria that killed 23 people, the population has been the victim of sectarian violence for years. In 2015, ISIS, who also claimed responsibility for the latest attack, beheaded 21 Coptic Christians in Libya. Casper joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor-in-chief Mark Galli this week to discuss the fascinating and important history of Coptic Christians, how the Egyptian church relates to a changing government, and why this most recent attack is unique. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It’s been a month since the election, so you’ve probably seen the exit poll statistic that 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump. (Some polls have disputed this number.) For Christians appalled and morally enraged by Trump’s remarks on race throughout the campaign, this apparent reality feels like “betrayal.” Although many white evangelical Trump voters (51%) said their vote was primarily against Clinton rather than for Trump, many of their fellow evangelicals don’t see this calculus as justified. Last week in The New York Times, Shane Claiborne and Tony Campolo wrote, “Evangelicalism was closely associated with the campaign of Donald J. Trump, and more than 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for the president-elect. This, despite large numbers of African American, Latino, Asian, young, and female evangelicals who were fiercely opposed to the racism, sexism, and xenophobia of Mr. Trump’s campaign.” So. Are white evangelical Trump supporters racist? “When we limit [racism] to strictly individual terms, we fail to see how people are using it,” says Wheaton College assistant professor of communication Theon Hill. “If we’re talking about racism in the context of this election, it may not always be that this person is or is not a Bull Connor descendent. It may be that this person is participating in a racist structure, intentionally or unintentionally.” Hill joined assistant editor Morgan Lee and editor-in-chief Mark Galli this week to discuss what he means by calling someone a racist, when believers should “try a little tenderness,” versus cleansing the temple, and why the church has a particular call to address racism in its ranks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Where can complementarian women go to find female teachers? For many, the answer lies outside of the local church. Because of theological beliefs, most complementarian churches don’t let women preach. Many also struggle to elevate women’s voices within their own congregations, indirectly encouraging women to look outside the church—at times to blogs, social media, and Christian publishing—for leadership. (Read CT’s previous coverage.) Part of the reason for the lack of voices stems from a historic distrust of female leadership, argues Wendy Alsup, who formerly led women’s ministries at Mars Hill Church in Seattle. “I think more and more people who identify as complementarian are putting away suspicions that women want to remove men from their places of leadership but it’s taken work to get to that place where their gifts are welcome,” she said. But women’s ministry can thrive in complementarian settings. A pastor and church elder board which seeks to affirm women’s voices is characterized by a “celebratory attitude” that values “every member of the body of a Christ,” says Elizabeth Inrig, who previously led women’s ministries for the Evangelical Free Church of America Inrig and Alsup joined Morgan and Richard on Quick to Listen to discuss the practical ways that complementarian churches can be intentional about including women’s voices, the roles of pastors wives, and how male participation at church affects female involvement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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For many Americans, our thoughts drift to North American’s original people only once or twice a year. But thanks to the Cleveland Indians’ World Series appearance and the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, you may have thought about Native Americans at some point before our national holiday. Thanksgiving offers a critical time for many of us to reflect on our nation’s history, says Randy Woodley, a Keetoowah Cherokee and professor of faith and culture at George Fox University. “Thanksgiving is a deep mythology within the American psyche,” said Woodley, who suggests that many of us have sanitized the holiday. “For three days they had this festival and no one questions what happens after,” he said. “The story is so treacherous and ugly that our mythology only includes what we want to feel good about.” For decades and later centuries after this peaceful and celebratory meal between the Pilgrims and Native Americans, settlers clashed violently with Indians and forcibly converted them to Christianity and “civilized” them. There was little understanding from Americans that Natives had something to offer them and their culture. They still do, says Woodley: the values of generosity and consensus. Woodley joined Morgan and guest-host Richard Clark to discuss why he himself chooses to celebrate Thanksgiving, how he learned to love Jesus despite the religion’s ugly impact on his ancestors, and the uncomfortable conditions it took for settlers to share their faith with Native Americans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Donald Trump is now the president-elect, the winner of at least 279 votes and 81 percent of the white evangelical vote, according to exit polls. Many people--including white evangelical leaders--did not see Trump’s victory coming. “I’m surprised,” said Ed Stetzer, who holds the Billy Graham Distinguished Chair for Church, Mission, and Evangelism at Wheaton College. “This is an overwhelming statement. It’s a repudiation of a lot of the system and President Obama.” The election revealed a split between “rank-and-file” evangelicals and leaders. Prior to the election, more than 60 percent of pastors told LifeWay Research they were not voting for Trump or were undecided. About 1 in 5 “evangelical insiders” told World Magazine at the end of the summer that they backed Trump. “Most evangelical leaders I know are not enthusiastically supporting Donald Trump,” said Stetzer, who formerly headed LifeWay Research. Despite this split, the group still represents people the same spiritual beliefs, said Stetzer, who recently worked with the National Association of Evangelicals to create a new definition of “evangelical.” And the goal of leaders isn’t necessarily to represent those beliefs of the masses. “It’s to be prophetic,” said Stetzer. Stetzer joined Morgan and Mark to discuss the limits of the evangelical umbrella, how white evangelicals’ voting affects evangelicals of color, and why Christians aren’t listening to their leaders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Best-selling author and blogger Jen Hatmaker’s books are no longer sold by LifeWay Christian Stores. Last week, the national Southern Baptist bookstore chain announced that it would no longer sell Hatmaker’s books because her perspectives on LGBT issues “contradict LifeWay’s doctrinal guidelines.” LifeWay’s announcement came several days after Hatmaker commented on same-sex marriage. “From a civil rights and civil liberties side and from just a human being side, any two adults have the right to choose who they want to love,” said Hatmaker in an interview with Religion News Service. “And they should be afforded the same legal protections as any of us. I would never wish anything less for my gay friends.” LifeWay’s assertion of its theological standards on LGBT issues offers Christians clarity in a post-Obergefell world, says author and writer Rosaria Butterfield. “It isn’t just enough to tip your hat to a creed that was buttressing the gospel at a different point in time,” said Butterfield. Organizations which require employees (and at times, other individuals affiliated with them) to sign a statement of faith remind people “that there’s actually a price to be here,” said Butterfield. Butterfield joined Morgan and guest host Ted Olsen, CT’s director of editorial development, to discuss the relevance of ancient creeds, how LGBT rights affect the future of evangelical institutions, and how the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision affected society’s definition of personhood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Two weeks from today, Election Day will be over. But will we have a president? Yes. Well, maybe not. “I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense,” GOP candidate Donald Trump said at the last presidential debate after the moderator asked if he would accept the election results. Trump’s suspicion towards the system reflects the views of 4 in 10 Americans who agreed that the election could be “stolen” from him as a result of voter fraud. This is but one area in which American democratic institutions have come into question. In recent years, law enforcement and the criminal justice system have been increasingly accused of racism and racial bias, while former Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders accused the country’s economy of being “rigged.” Some of the other rigged accusations may have merit, says Elesha Coffman, an assistant professor of history at Baylor University. But applying this term to the United States’ elections is “horrifying.” “It is unprecedented to say, ‘I don’t know, I’ll keep you in suspense,’” said Coffman. “It was profoundly undemocratic and profoundly destabilizing, and you really wonder if and when Trump goes down … what all is he taking down with him.” Coffman joins Mark and Morgan on Quick to Listen to discuss whether the Gilded Age should be seen as an aberration or norm, the problem with trying to use the criminal justice system to make a point, and whether gerrymandering leads to accusations of rigged elections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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After 21 years, Books & Culture will cease publication after the release of its November/December 2016 issue. "Publishing print in a digital age is hard. Publishing print that is thoughtful is even harder,” writes Christianity Today president and CEO Harold Smith in the last issue. “And as a result, all that red ink has sadly forced Christianity Today to end the exceptional run of this outstanding Christian thought journal with this issue." When Christianity Today created B&C in 1995, “some people thought Books and Culture was going to be sort of a culture war vehicle, like Chuck Colson but a little more intellectual,” said John Wilson, the first and only editor of the publication. “I honestly think that if it had been like that it would have been more financially viable, but that wasn’t the intention from the outset,” said Wilson. “…We weren’t a movement magazine.” B&C co-chair Mark Noll helped start the publication in 1994, the same year his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind was released. “I’m quite depressed about the state of the world as is reflected in its closing,” said Noll, a history professor at Notre Dame University, who believes the magazine thrived because of Wilson’s vision and expertise. “John’s singular ability in an age of polemics and partisanship and gotcha-journalism was to emphasis the long-term, to be thoughtful rather than reactive, to try to bring insight rather than onslaught,” said Noll. Noll and Wilson join Mark and Morgan to discuss where B&C’s departure leaves the evangelical intellectual world, the specific conditions that made the publication possible, and how Noll’s Calvinist convictions inform his attitude towards the closure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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By now, you’ve probably seen the 2005 video of Donald Trump bragging to then–Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush about his aggressive groping and kissing of women. If you’re running for election as a Republican, it may have encouraged you to change your strategy. (Arizona Senator John McCain dropped his endorsement. GOP House Leader Paul Ryan has said he’ll stop campaigning for Trump.) But so far, Trump’s most vocal evangelical supporters—including James Dobson, Eric Metaxas, Tony Perkins, and Jerry Falwell—haven’t wavered in their support. (Read CT’s full report.) “The whole thing is baffling yet predictable,” said Jemar Tisby, the president and co-founder of the Reformed African American Network. While allegations of Trump’s previous sexual attacks on women currently make the news, his campaign won the primary while proposing a ban on Muslims from entering the US and attacking a Mexican-American judge for his heritage, actions indicative of a larger thread in Republican history, said Tisby. “That Donald Trump, out of 16 candidates, would end up being the nominee is on one hand utterly perplexing. On the other hand it doesn’t surprise me in the sense that what he’s playing to what has been present in the GOP for decades,” he said. But will this be true in the future? “I’ve seen a lot of people want to say ‘The Religious Right is finished. They don’t have the clout that they had,’” said Matthew Lee Anderson, the founder of Mere Orthodoxy. “I think that it’s way too premature to say that sort of thing. We do need a couple of election cycles…One of the things that I will watch very carefully will be what happens at Liberty University on November 8.” Tisby and Anderson join Morgan and Christianity Today’s editor-in-chief, Mark Galli, on Quick to Listen this week to discuss what has and has not changed for evangelicals following the latest Trump scandal, how Billy Graham’s political philosophy shaped Christian engagement, and what personal blind spots have been revealed in their own lives over the course of the election. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Do people have the ability to turn to God on their own initiative? Can individuals contribute to their own salvation? Did God create Jesus? These are 3 of nearly 47 positions LifeWay Research asked 3,000 Americans in a recent study for Ligonier Ministries on heresy. The study, which included a sample of 586 evangelicals, asked respondents their beliefs on 47 theological statements. When the report was released two years ago, the results indicated that many self-identified evangelicals held unorthodox views on the Trinity and salvation. This year, the National Association of Evangelicals and LifeWay Research developed a new definition of evangelical. But the results were similar. LifeWay Research director Scott McConnell doesn’t think researchers’ definition of evangelical needs to change, but he does believe the survey suggests just how “shallow many people’s beliefs are.” “The fact is that God’s message to us and God’s relationship to us is really a tapestry. Each of those threads of belief and love and relationship are woven together,” said McConnell. “It takes an individual really loving God enough to want to know this whole message and want to understand how it fits together.” One potential obstacle: People—evangelicals—don’t take or make this time to learn about God. “Sometimes, as Christians in America, we’re so busy running from one thing to another without taking the time to really closely see how this relationship with God works,” said McConnell. “I think you can see this in the variety of responses [to this survey] where people are in the right theologically on several questions and then completely missing it on others.” McConnell joined Morgan and Ted on Quick to Listen this week to discuss what contributes to Christians’ misunderstandings of the Holy Spirit, what the limits of these findings are, and if pastors should preach any differently in light of the survey results. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Katelyn Beaty is moving on. Christianity Today’s first female and youngest print managing editor, the leader of This Is Our City and founder of Her.meneutics, and one of CT’s first podcast hosts, Beaty cemented her legacy in her nine years at the organization. Katelyn spoke with Morgan and The Calling’s Richard Clark this week on Quick to Listen as they discussed the last decade. On the success of Her.meneutics: I don’t attribute that to my stealth leadership. It was really about starting a conversation, gathering more women writers, and giving them a chance to write for the print magazine…A lot of those writers ended up having a larger platform to the broader church and not just staying in their lady cocoon. On her first CT editorial calling Christians to stop bashing Hillary Clinton: “Jim Wallis liked it. I guess that’s no surprise.” On reading CT in college: “I remember printing [the editorials] off as if ‘this is the premiere Christian opinion on this topic. This is a model on cultural engagement.’” On the importance of genre: Working on this upcoming Ann Voskamp profile, for awhile I thought, ‘Should this just be a straight interview?’ She’s super interesting to listen to. Very articulate. Speaks in complete sentences which is not true of all our interview subjects. But I ultimately decided to go with the profile genre because it allowed me to draw in what others have said about her. On the internet: “I think the temptation is to look at what’s happening online and try to replicate it in a print magazine.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This week, we’ve been having a national conversation about candy. "If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful?'' states a tweet posted by Donald Trump Jr. earlier this week. "That's our Syrian refugee problem." "This image says it all. Let's end the politically correct agenda that doesn't put America first." Trump Jr.’s image has gone viral—but not necessarily because its message resonates with the truth. “There are theological problems with comparing human beings made in the image of God to candy,” said Matthew Soerens, the US director of church mobilization at World Relief, a group which helps the government resettle refugees. He added: “It’s a good rhetorical tool but it’s based on bad data.” Only two refugees out the thousands that have been admitted since the 1970s had committed terrorist attacks, said Soerens, citing a recent report from the Cato Institute. “There’s been none since the 1980s.” “If you include that, the odds of being killed by a refugee who commits terrorist activity in the United States if you’re an American is 1.36 billion,” said Soerens. In spite of this debate, this past fiscal year, the US welcomed more than 10,000 Syrian refugees. But while Christians have been increasingly persecuted by ISIS, fewer than 150 entered the country this year. So where are they, asks Nina Shea, who directs the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute. “They are facing genocide by ISIS...the worst human rights violation of all,” said Shea. “They are not coming into the United States in the proportion that would be fair.” Soerens and Shea joined Morgan and Katelyn to discuss what obstacles may be facing Syrian Christians trying to enter the United States, why many may have remained in their homeland, and whether the US should double the number of refugees it admits annually. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last week, the Crossway board of directors and English Standard Version (ESV) Translation Oversight Committee announced that, after 17 years, it would be making no further revisions to the ESV translation. “The decision now to create the permanent text of the ESV was made with equally great care—so that people who love the ESV Bible can have full confidence in the ESV, knowing that it will continue to be published as is, without being changed, for the rest of their lives, and for generations to come,” the publishers wrote in a statement. (Read CT’s story.) What’s behind Crossway’s decision? Craig Blomberg, who has advised the translation teams of the ESV, New International Version, Holman Christian Study Bible, and New Living Translation in various capacities in his professional career, shared his insights on Quick to Listen this week. “The ESV is produced by a publisher, and men on the committee, many of whom I know, are of the mindset that they want to foster confidence in the Bible as God’s Word,” said Blomberg, who is also New Testament professor at Denver Seminary. “I don’t know to what extent the word has gotten around to media, publishers, general public, but when the ESV was first created, the committee continued to meet on a regular basis, as do other Bible translation committees, and made a number of comparatively minor changes and updates to what they believed were improved translations to various passages and then simply introduced them in the new printing without any publicity or any fanfare.” Here’s Craig Blomberg, a New Testament professor at Denver Seminary, offering Morgan and Katelyn an inside scoop into the translation process, whether the number of translations serves or hinders the church, and what’s up with the dozens of Bibles tailored to moms, athletes, and small children. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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From a numbers perspective, for every American church, there are about two people returning home from incarceration annually. Yet, just 1 in 5 churches (22%) that average 250 or more attendees have formal ministries for people leaving correctional facilities according to a LifeWay Research survey of 1,000 evangelical and mainline pastors conducted earlier this year. Many pastors just aren’t aware of how dramatically incarceration affects their congregation, says Dominique Gilliard, a pastor at Convergence Covenant Church in Oakland, California. “Churches have created a cone of silence around this issue. It becomes so stigmatized. I can’t tell you all the times I go and preach or teach at a church and the pastor is completely unaware that people are dealing with this,” said Gilliard, who is writing a book about restorative justice. “People are lined up after service to come to talk to me because this is the first time that they heard their church talk about this.” Once church leadership and attendees decide they do want to address the issue, they should start by educating themselves. “I always tell people that they have to examine their internal biases because we all have them,” said Miea Walker, the Second Chance Alliance outreach coordinator for the North Carolina Justice Center. “It starts with understanding the landscape of mass incarceration. Often times people will want to just come in and help, Oh those poor souls, they need us. We really miss the big picture. We are not reading and learning how we got here.” Gilliard and Walker join Morgan and Katelyn to discuss the nitty gritty of supporting families of those incarcerated, why the church must work with criminal justice reform beyond prisons, and why not all Christians’ work on this issue will or should look the same. Further Reading for Subscribers http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2016/september/life-after-prison.html http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2016/september/does-your-church-talk-about-prison.html http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2016/september/criminal-justice-reform-prison-ministry.html http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2016/september/our-back-from-prison-family.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Katelyn and Morgan are off this week, so we're presenting Quick to Listen listeners with Katelyn's recent appearance on Christianity Today's other podcast: The Calling. In this episode, Katelyn chats with The Calling's host Richard Clark about being a woman on the cutting edge of evangelical leadership, her new book, A Woman’s Place, and personal and professional challenges she's encountered when pursuing her calling.

Quick to Listen will return with a new episode next week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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In anticipation of his upcoming film about Nat Turner, a slave who led a rebellion against the system, its filmmaker and star, Nate Parker told CT that he hoped the movie would unsettle American Christians. “[I hoped] Christians would be put at a crossroads, that this would be a moment where they have to ask themselves, Wow, this is the Word, but it's very clearly being used to oppress—Where is the line?” the Birth of Nation creator said in an interview with CT earlier this month. “I ask myself: if Christ was here, how would he react to the misuse and misrepresentation of his name and his actions? How might we be more effective in holding ourselves as Christians accountable to his actual word? I, for one, believe that partisanship should have nothing to do with the actions of Christ. You're either Christlike, or you're not.” In the past two weeks, however, Parker has come under scrutiny after Variety reported that the woman who accused Parker and his college roommate of raping her while they were students at Penn State in the late 1990s had committed suicide. That accusation had led to Parker’s arrest and trial. In 2001, he was acquitted of the charges of sexual assault, and has maintained recently that what happened was consensual. His roommate—who is also the film’s co-writer—was convicted, but the conviction was later overturned on appeal after the accuser declined to testify for a retrial. Along with Parker’s faith and race, the nature of the accusations and the fact that Birth of a Nation also features a sexual assault scene has caused a maelstrom of angry, sad, and conflicted reactions. Alissa Wilkinson, Christianity Today's chief film critic, has been a fan of the film since she saw it at Sundance. “I certainly believe that his faith is sincere. I believe people change and mature and grow in their faith and they often look back on things that they did when they were younger in horror,” said Wilkinson. But she’s been disappointed with Parker’s reaction--largely because Birth of a Nation’s deep understanding of systemic oppression doesn’t seem to have mirrored in the filmmaker’s responses about sexual assault. Christians asking why Parker “should own something he did not do,” have an incomplete understanding of what Christians are called to in these situations, said Ekemini Uwan. “I think a lot of Christians are calling for cheap grace, which is grace without truth, which is unacceptable,” said Uwan, a recent graduate of Westminster Theological Seminary. “You don’t receive salvation unless you confess sin and live in the light.” Uwan and Wilkinson join Morgan and Katelyn this week to discuss how Christians should make sense of the allegations against Parker, how we understand the complicating role that race plays in our reactions, and whether or not we can separate the artist from his or her art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Did you see the Americans’ sweep the hurdles last night? Do you go to bed at night still thinking about Katie Ledecky breaking her own world records? Do you have dozens of hours of unwatched pool play handball games on your DVR? We have a podcast for you. Two-time Olympian Josh Davis—who swam with Michael Phelps in his last Olympics—and recently-returned-from-Rio correspondent Tim Ellsworth joined Quick to Listen this week. Despite the euphoria of attending the games and winning medals—Davis won five medals during his trips to the Atlanta 1996 and Sydney 2000 games—making the transition back to the real world can be difficult at times. “I think everyone experiences it to varying degrees, but there is a letdown,” said Davis. “When you come off a church retreat, church camp, summer project, mission trip, and you come back to the regular world, it’s like ‘Oh man.’ It’s kind of like leaving heaven.” Sharing his experiences with young people across the country ultimately made the transition easier, says Davis, a public speaker, who just got a job leading Oklahoma Christian University’s new swim program. London 2012 gold medalist David Boudia would relate to the letdown feeling, says Ellsworth, who along with Boudia, recently co-wrote Greater Than Gold: From Olympic Heartbreak to Ultimate Redemption, about the gold-medalist diver's life and faith. “Even though he had become a believer and even though in 2012 he knew that a gold medal was not the pinnacle of his existence and most precious thing in his life, I think there was still a part of him that thought that that would bring a sense of satisfaction in his life that he didn’t have otherwise,” said Ellsworth. Instead, Boudia soon realized that few things had changed—except the level of media attention and scrutiny—and the temptation to “put himself as the center of everything.” An eventual antidote: Boudia’s marriage to his wife, Sonny, and the birth of their daughter Dakota, helped him reset his priorities. Davis and Ellsworth joined Morgan and guest host Ted OIsen to talk about the biggest misconceptions that the public has about the games, finding Christian community in the Olympic village, and where evidence of athletes’ faith has been on display during the games. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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If voter turnout is any indication, Americans don’t care that much about local elections. During presidential elections, about 60 percent of those eligible head to the polls. During midterms, it's only about 40 percent. It gets worse. During municipal elections, voter turnout falls another 20 points, with only 1 in 5 of those eligible voting for mayor. But local level politics--often affecting housing, transportation, education, and business--can have significant repercussions for communities. And it’s more than voting, says Stephen K. Reeves, the associate coordinator of partnerships and advocacy, for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Reeves advises Christians to start showing up at city meetings and spending time with their local leaders. “In our current political climate in Washington, there’s so much gridlock,” said Reeves. “People often turn to the state and local level to get things done, [the level] where you have more problem solvers, people who are more about making a difference in a more immediate way, versus [fighting] an ideological battle that may [exist] at the national or state level.” Reeves joined Morgan Lee and guest host Richard Clark on Quick to Listen to discuss what happens when your political opponent shows up at your church, why policymakers’ responsiveness depends on their proximity to people, and how churches can make the most effective cases to local officials. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last week, theologian and ethicist Wayne Grudem offered his endorsement of GOP candidate Donald Trump. In “Why Voting for Donald Trump Is a Morally Good Choice,” Grudem conceded that Trump had been far from perfect: He is egotistical, bombastic, and brash. He often lacks nuance in his statements. Sometimes he blurts out mistaken ideas (such as bombing the families of terrorists) that he later must abandon. He insults people. He can be vindictive when people attack him. He has been slow to disown and rebuke the wrongful words and actions of some angry fringe supporters. He has been married three times and claims to have been unfaithful in his marriages. These are certainly flaws, but I don’t think they are disqualifying flaws in this election. Grudem concedes that while Trump’s character is problematic, he concludes that the billionaire is “a good candidate with flaws” because “most of the policies he supports are those that will do the most good for the nation.” Trump isn’t the only candidate whose reputation has taken a hit because of moral transgressions. Hillary Clinton has also been rebuffed for her character, most recently for using her own personal email server, rather than the State Department’s, when sending classified emails as Secretary of State (ultimately resulting in both FBI and State Department investigations). Our views on the role of government—whether it’s there primarily to protect people or “keep the peace,” plays a significant role in the priority we give character when judging candidates, says Messiah College historian John Fea. “If you believe that government has the responsibility to promote the common good and general welfare and moral good of the society and it’s ordained by God to do that, then for me, I would probably want someone with character and is interested in those questions at least,” he said. Fea joined Morgan Lee and guest host Amy Jackson to discuss how Americans have historically voted on character in previous elections, how the mass media has changed the country’s understanding of a candidate’s moral failures, and when, if ever, the ends justify the means. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Earlier this week, ESPN’s analytics site FiveThirtyEight gave Hillary Clinton a 60 percent of winning the presidency in November. Should Clinton win this fall, however, it’s unlikely she’ll be thanking many evangelicals. According to a Pew Research Study from earlier this month, only 16 percent of evangelical voters said they would vote for her. Not only that, when asked about their motivation, an overwhelming number suggested that they were either voting for Donald Trump because they didn’t like Clinton or were only voting Clinton because they disliked Trump more. (Overall: 30 percent supported Trump and would vote for him, 45 percent said they would vote for Trump because they did not want Clinton to win, 10 percent would be voting against Trump for Clinton and only 6 percent said they would vote Clinton because they backed her. Read CT’s report.) This disdain has been around for a long time. Alan Noble, an English professor at Oklahoma Baptist University, remembers listening to talk radio disparaging Clinton back when he was a kid in the ’90s. “Every time I [hear] the name Clinton, there’s all this baggage, rhetoric, language, fear, anxiety, corruption, sliminess, conniving, big government baked into me [from when I was a child]” said Noble, who is also the editor-in-chief of Christ and Pop Culture. What’s behind these visceral reactions? “The history of American evangelicalism is critical in understanding how many things Clinton stands for that contradict the deeply held values of politically engaged evangelicals since the 1960s,” said Kristin Du Mez, a historian at Calvin College and the author of a forthcoming book about Hillary Clinton’s faith. “On so many issues, Hillary Clinton—her politics and the way her faith informs [them]—run against the values that the religious right has held dear. … There are very real religious and political differences here.” Both Du Mez and Noble joined Morgan and Katelyn to discuss how Clinton’s “baking cookie” comments alienated her from stay-at-home moms, why she’s largely stopped standing up for evangelicals, and how gender has affected her popularity among Christians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The world can be divided into two camps: people who are playing Pokémon Go and people who haven’t realized what they’re missing. Drew Dixon falls in the former camp. An avid gamer and editor-in-chief of the nonprofit Game Church, the Nashville resident has spent the greater part of this month catching Pokémon, while exploring his city and making new friends. Earlier this week, Dixon wrote for The Local Church on what Christians miss by turning the gaming phenomenon into a recruitment tool. “I’m beginning to suspect that by plotting ways to leverage Pokémon Go to get more people in their pews, many churches are missing out on the exploratory, community-building spirit that makes the game such a powerful cultural force—the same spirit, in fact, that represents its greatest opportunity for churches nationwide,” he wrote. One question churches might start asking themselves instead: ”How could we possibly engage in this game redemptively in a way that would be loving to our neighbor and would celebrate something in creation that is good?” Dixon joined Morgan and Katelyn this week to discuss the allure of video games, how churches have positively responded to Pokémon Go players, and why we love to play. Plus, everyone shares their favorite game. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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On Tuesday, President Obama honored the lives of the five Dallas police officers shot dead last week by a sniper in Dallas. He also reflected on the deaths of two black men, Philando Castile and Anton Sterling, who were shot dead by police officers last week, and of the suffering he’s witnessed during his time in the White House. “I’ve seen how inadequate words can be in bringing about lasting change,” said Obama. “I’ve seen how inadequate my own words have been. And so, I’m reminded of a passage in John’s Gospel, ‘let us love, not with words or speech, but with actions and in truth.’” (Note: We’re aware that the president actually quoted 1 John.) In the wake of last week’s shootings, Joshua DuBois, the former head of the White House’s Office of Faith Based Partnerships, responded with action, creating a form letter for citizens to send their local police chiefs. As of writing, the tweet has been retweeted nearly 5,000 times. “I live outside of DC and realized I had never had a conversation with my police chief in my town...I wanted to have that dialogue to affirm the hard and difficult work that police officers are engaged in every day, but also to ask questions about how prepared they are to deescalate conflict and address bias,” said DuBois, who now leads Values Partnership, a consulting firm. “What’s fascinating is that people are writing their own chiefs and their chiefs are responding,” DuBois joined Morgan and Katelyn this week to discuss what led him to create this letter, how majority culture Christians can avoid shutting down conversations with those of color, and why anger should not be a deterrent to engagement. (10:10) Joshua, what went into your decision to create this police department form letter? (15:08) In circumstances like last week, what voices should be elevated? How should they be elevated? (20:25) What is a powerful example of what solidarity looks like? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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“As a psychiatrist, I diagnose mental illness. Also, I help spot demonic possession.” That’s the headline from a Washington Post essay from Richard Gallagher, a Catholic Ivy-league educated mental health professional who has worked for decades with priests to determine the difference between the two phenomena. While Gallagher’s colleagues have raised their eyebrows at the nature of his work, “careful observation of the evidence presented to me in my career has led me to believe that certain extremely uncommon cases can be explained no other way,” he writes. Part of that comes with experience, says Eric Johnson, a professor of pastoral care at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. When “you have experience with people with schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder and someone that is demon-possessed, you know the difference,” says Johnson, recalling what others who have worked with those in both situations have told him. (Johnson has not himself worked directly with anyone he believes suffered from demonic possession.) Johnson joined Katelyn and Morgan to discuss studying the supernatural, how our understanding of mental health makes sense of spiritual warfare, and the importance of holistic health. • (5:45) As a psychologist, how do you discern the difference between the demonic and mental illness? • (13:30) When did people start studying mental illness as a phenomena? • (21:18) You talk about the importance of keeping an open mind while also being skeptical when it comes to these issues. What part of the church does this apply to? • (5:45) As a psychologist, how do you discern the difference between demonic and mental illness? • (13:30) When did people start studying mental illness as a phenomena? • (21:18) You talk about the importance of keeping an open mind while also being skeptical when it comes to these issues. What part of the church does this apply to? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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In honor of the long weekend, Morgan and Katelyn thought they would take some time to appreciate the good things in life.

Joined with podcast producer and host of CT’s other podcast, The Calling, Richard Clark, Morgan and Katelyn discuss the precious moments they look forward to, a few great articles they’ve read in the last week, and suggest some things our listeners can check out to enrich their weekend. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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On Sunday, Lebron James led the Cleveland Cavaliers to victory over the Golden State Warriors in Game 7 at home in Oakland. At one time, the Warriors had led the series 3-1, before they lost three in a row for the first time since 2013. During the Warriors’ Game 6 loss to the Cavaliers, Steph Curry fouled out for the first time all year before throwing his mouth guard into the stands. He was then suspended after swearing at the referees. Later, his wife Ayesha Curry tweeted that the game was “absolutely rigged for money” before she later deleted it. Not everyone was happy with the reaction of either Curry, a couple known for their Christian faith. (Some called for the NBA to suspend Steph, while Ayesha deleted her tweet following criticism on Twitter.) While Steph is open about his faith, he has largely communicated this through his actions, rather than bold proclamations of faith, says columnist Marcus Thompson, who has covered the Warriors for nearly two decades. “In the absence of words, you should probably look at how people live,” said Thompson. “Steph’s not going to be the one out there touting himself because in moments like Game 6, when he is human, it will get held against them, whereas if anybody did the exact same thing, there would be no discussion about it. Thompson joined Morgan and Katelyn on Quick to Listen this week to talk about the mentality of Christians athletes, why fans should cut Steph a break, and what Lebron teaches us about what redemption looks like in the world of sports. (9:45) What are most media missing about this story? (14:53) How does Steph deal with the tensions of being a Christian superstar? (25:45) What does redemption mean in sports? What can be redeemed on the court and what can’t? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Forty-nine people lost their lives after a gunman opened fire in an Orlando nightclub early Sunday morning. In the days since the shooting, mainstream and social media responses have discussed and analyzed hatred and violence against LGBT communities, the merits of gun control, anti-Muslim sentiments, whether prayer is an appropriate response to tragedies, and if Christians who hold to traditional views on marriage are complicit in anti-LGBT violence. Are the array of opinions and facts available on our phones or television screens actually helping us? “We use media when we can’t be present,” says Andy Crouch, CT’s executive editor. While this type of technology makes many things possible--including this very podcast, and the article you are currently reading--it has several major disadvantages, Crouch says. “The one thing that media are really bad at doing is the one thing needed in the immediate wake of any trauma for any person or community: the silence that’s possible when you’re present in the body but impossible to communicate through media,” he says. Crouch joined Morgan and Katelyn on Quick to Listen this week to discuss social media’s specific disruption to reacting to tragedies, whether our cynicism over prayer is merited, and the dangers of responding to horror as an ideologue. (7:23) Andy, you have previously lamented the way media broadcasting runs on constant information and analysis without leaving room for mourning in silence or prayer. Did we see media work in a similar way in covering the Orlando shooting? (18:31) At what point after tragedy do we start offering up analysis or policy recommendations? (27:30) After tragedy, are there ways prayer inhibits us from action? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Former Trump University students say their school duped them into paying as much as $35,000 for its real estate seminars. So they sued and the case is currently in court. You probably know what happened next. Last week, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump went after the judge presiding over the civil fraud lawsuits—because of his ethnicity. “He's Mexican. We're building a wall between here and Mexico,” said Trump, who claimed that the Indiana-born US District Judge Gonzalo Curiel faced an “absolute conflict,” in ruling on the billionaire’s case. Trump’s words were the “textbook definition of a racist comment,” said GOP Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. Trump has since suggested that his remarks were “misconstrued.” Trump’s words were wrong, but it’s also incorrect to think that someone can do their jobs without their ethnic background coming into play, said Gabriel Salguero, the founder and president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, who joined Quick to Listen this week. “God’s sovereign will places us into the context into which we’re born,” said Salguero. “Does that impact how we see the world? Of course it does! The Christian shouldn’t see diversity as a deficit but as a gift.” One reason why we often see others as threats: fears of limited resources, says Alma Zaragoza-Petty, the daughter of Mexican immigrants. who recently completed her Ph.D in educational policy and social context at UC Irvine and who also came on Quick to Listen. But “God’s love is abundant,” said Zaragoza-Petty. Zaragoza-Petty and Salguero joined Morgan and Katelyn on Quick to Listen this week to talk about whether a person’s ethnicity should affect how their work and who decides who gets to be an America. (6:50) Are there times when our ethnic background actually should or can influence the way we do our jobs? (14:50) How do we determine who is an American, and who gets to decide that? (23:20) How have you seen fears of scarcity of resources in your own community and how have you responded to it? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last Saturday, a four-year-old boy climbed the wall of the Cincinnati Zoo’s gorilla exhibit and tumbled into the moat. After Harambe, the zoo’s 17-year-old gorilla, dragged the boy through the water multiple times, a zookeeper shot and killed the animal. Over the weekend, the story provoked national speculation, fury, and sadness over parenting, zoos, and dead animals. While zoo officials were right to kill Harambe to protect the toddler, the Bible is clear that animals have value, says Karen Swallow Prior, an English professor at Liberty University, and a member of the Faith Advisory Council of the Humane Society of the United States. “Let’s go back to Genesis and the Bible. Very clearly there is something that we as human beings share with animals, in terms of having animation, having a moving spirit,” said Prior. “We are made in God’s image, animals are not, but we still have the breath of life in us. God himself indicates in the Genesis account that there is a special relationship between humans and animals because God gives Adam the job of naming animals.” Prior joined Morgan and Katelyn on Quick to Listen this week to talk about the history of zoos, if we should apply human emotions to animals, and whether animals go to heaven. (6:50) What are the objects of the public’s love in this story? (14:50) For many, this story pits animals against humans. Is that a false choice? Why do we prioritize the child’s life over the gorilla’s? (21:20) What do zoos assume about the way the world should be? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This week, 10 states announced that they would sue the Obama administration following its executive order mandating that school districts allow transgender students to use their bathroom of their preferred gender. On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed an amendment aimed at preventing the US government from withholding federal funds from North Carolina, after the state passed its controversial “bathroom bill,” requiring people to use the bathroom that matches their birth certificate this March. This comes on the heels of the Justice Department’s decision to sue the state for the law for “state-sponsored discrimination.” Few of these political fights have helped anyone better understand the nuances of transgenderism, says Mark Yarhouse, the author of Understanding Gender Dysphoria and founder of the Institute for the Study of Sexual Identity. “People experience legislation as an attack on the things that they believe in, and other people think that legislation is symbolic of the things that matter the most to them,” he said. “You could easily have two sides speaking past each other. I think that’s what we have today.” CT believes that God created people with male and female identities and would generally encourage integration and alignment of gender identity with biological sex, based on a creational account of male and female (Gen. 1-2) and the overall goodness of bodies and embodiment. But what does that belief mean for how Christians engage this topic in the world? Yarhouse joined Morgan and Katelyn on Quick to Listen this week to discuss what’s behind the term cis-gender, what the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage may mean about evangelicals’ response, and how one transgender Christian has handled the bathroom conversation in her church. (5:30) What do bathrooms have to do with larger discussions about gender identity and the broader LGBTQ movement? (8:45) Is it accurate to describe transgender people as an immutable class or is it more complicated than that? (14:20) What ways other than politics and reality shows that Americans can learn more about the transgender experience? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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If you’re on Facebook, you’ve probably glanced at--and maybe clicked into--the trending headlines on your timeline. Maybe you thought these stories were generated by an algorithm. You’d be wrong. Instead, Facebook employed a team of people who selected these stories, with a bit of influence from management. Higher-ups repeatedly instructed the team to keep “stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users,” reported Gizmodo, which broke the story. “Facebook’s bottom line and their shareholders’ best interests are Facebook’s best interests,” said our guest Adam Graber, who writes about technology and the church. “Facebook wants to keep you on their site and keep you clicking. If they can keep a trending topics bar to help you do that, they’re going do that. Yes, they’re looking to keep their users happy but their users aren’t necessarily the ones driving the value of their site.” Graber joined Morgan and guest co-host Ted Olsen to discuss why we value neutrality, how algorithms can both benefit our lives and warp our realities, and whether there’s overlap in CT’s own practices and those of its trending curators. (3:09) What is an algorithm? (5:25) What makes Facebook’s actions so distressing? (12:27) Given previous decisions, can and should Facebook, as a content distributor and business, actually be neutral? (20:26) How can we consume content and order information in ways that are inherently more or less Christian? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last week, John Kasich and Ted Cruz suspended their presidential campaigns, making Donald Trump the presumptive Republican nominee. The news left many evangelicals praying for Nebraska senator and avid Trump critic Ben Sasse to jump into the race as a third party candidate and sharing Russell Moore’s article on voting for “the lesser of two evils.” D.C.-based pastor and writer Thabiti Anyabwile took a different tact. “Let the hate begin,” he tweeted earlier this week. “But if choice is between [Hillary] Clinton and Trump, I'm voting Clinton. I'll go back to not voting when this man is defeated!” But a lot of people aren’t convinced. Just prior to Cruz’s concession, polls showed anywhere between 16 percent to 24 percent of churchgoing evangelical voters faced with a Trump vs. Clinton matchup, would choose to stay home or vote for a third-party candidate. (Here’s a deep dive into the numbers.) Anyabwile, who has emphatically stated that he is no fan of Clinton, has abstained from voting in recent previous presidential elections. “For the last several elections, I’ve been that principled guy saying ‘I just can’t vote for anybody,’” Anyabwile said. “But this particular election has brought me to a place where I’m staring my principles in the face and I have a different type of crisis of conscience. I can’t opt for a personal type of quietism here, where I palliate my own conscience. I actually have to inform my conscience.” Anyabwile joins Katelyn and Morgan on this week’s Quick to Listen to discuss third party options, what it’s historically like to vote as an African American, and what makes the Trump option different. (5:49) In response to Trump's likely Republican win, many Christians are advocating for a third-party option. Thabiti, you have explicitly critiqued that option. Why? (15:42) What does it mean to inform your conscience? How should our consciences play a role in determining how to vote? How can they also mislead us? (17:35) It’s rare that most people have found candidates who represent all their interests—in fact, many times minorities have had candidates representing their parties who have little love or interest in serving their needs. To what extent are those calling for a third party candidate showing their privilege in expecting to have a candidate that primarily agrees with them? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Everything’s possible if you work hard enough. At least that’s what shows Biggest Loser (NBC), Extreme Weight Loss (ABC) and Fit to Fat to Fit (A&E) suggest to their audiences. But it’s not necessarily true, as The New York Times reported this week in an in-depth examination about the lives of Biggest Loser contestants—many of whom regained the weight they had lost over the course of the show after they left. As the Times reports, biology—specifically one’s metabolism—plays a significant role in determining a person’s weight and their ability to lose weight. This news may bring relief to the former contestants, but it also ought to challenge society about its own assumptions about individuals and weight. “As Christians we want to be welcoming to everyone and not judge someone based on their size but when it gets down to it, a lot of times we may think What is wrong with this person that they haven’t taken care of their health?” says CT’s online associate editor and reality television show fan Kate Shellnutt. Shellnutt joins Morgan and Katelyn this week in Quick to Listen to discuss the relationship between social media and weight loss, how reality TV shames the wrong people, and how we can honor ourselves. One of the main contestants profiled in the NYT piece is a pastor in North Carolina who gained back a significant amount of weight after going on the show. He says his metabolism is now so slow, “It’s kind of like hearing you have a life sentence." How does this idea challenge common conceptions about people who are overweight or obese, such as, "It's all their fault," "they're lazy," etc.? What's going on in our attraction to reality TV shows? How do they speak to our particular cultural moment or spiritual desires? What's holistic health? Are there specific ways Christian communities can lead on the issue of holistic health? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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On Saturday, Beyoncé released her 12-song visual album, Lemonade, in which the 20-time Grammy award winning artist known for “Single Ladies,” “Irreplaceable,” and “Crazy in Love,” explored themes of anger, loss, redemption, and resurrection. The album’s lyrics and imagery also included a plethora of Christian references, including mentions of the “Holy Book,” “baptism”, and visuals of the Bible. “Chapters” within the visual album are named “emptiness,” “forgiveness,” “resurrection,” and “redemption.” “[I] went to the basement, confessed my sins, and was baptized in a river,” Beyonce says at the beginning of “Intuition.” “I got on my knees and said 'amen'... and said 'I mean.'” In “Anger,” text reading “God is God and I am not” momentarily appears on the screen, a section that moved Zakiya N. Jackson, who wrote about her initial reaction to the album’s release on Collected Young Minds. “It really is about being frustrated and angry, this sense of this isn’t right, what I have experienced. But even in the midst of this, there’s this acknowledgement that I can’t control all of this,” she said. “I love that because this place of letting go is acknowledging that God is bigger than me and that I can’t make everything the way I want it to be.” Jackson joined Morgan and Katelyn on this week’s Quick to Listen to discuss what Beyonce means to black women, what makes her message stand apart, and whether it’s time to make more lemonade. -What makes Beyonce unique? What about her work moves you? -As Christians, how did you interpret or perceive the religious references in the visual album? -It seems like the significance of Beyonce’s work is tied to her identity as a black woman. Why is that important? Why does that that resonate? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last week, Darrin Patrick, vice president of the Acts 29 church planting network and founding pastor of The Journey megachurch in St. Louis, was fired. (Read CT’s story.) Among the Reformed pastor’s offenses: “domineering over those in his charge,” “misuse of power/authority,” and “history of building his identity through ministry and media platforms.” TL;DR: pride. The son of uber popular Reformed pastor John Piper and author and blogger in his own right, Barnabas Piper joined Quick to Listen this week to offer his perspective to this thorny and recurring issue. “With the internet being what it is, local church ministry is no longer local church ministry,” says Piper, pointing to the number of pastors who publish books, host their own podcasts, and maintain an active social media presence. “Pride is an occupational hazard for all of us: if you have a byline, if your name is on a book, or you have a podcast, it comes with pride.” Here’s Piper’s chat with Morgan and Katelyn about what may make Acts 29 leaders prone to arrogance, what a pastor’s kid thinks other pastor’s kids are thinking after their parent messes up, and the circumstances under which a pastor should be restored. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Less than a year after a Supreme Court verdict guaranteed same-sex marriage across the country, Christian conservatives and LGBT rights advocates remain at odds. The object of discontent: legislation that proponents say would guarantee the rights of people of faith to make hiring and employment decisions based on that faith, but which opponents claim would be used as a weapon to discriminate against LGBT people. CT recognizes that Christians hold a broad array of perspectives on these issues and invited Thomas Berg, a religious liberty scholar, to share his thoughts on the bills’ cultural and legal context. Berg teaches at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis and has had his work cited by the Supreme Court. In the latest episode of Quick to Listen, Berg chatted with Morgan and Katelyn about the significance of non-discrimination ordinances, why LGBT activists feel especially threatened by much of the recent legislation, and why he thinks the two sides actually share something important in common. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You’ve heard the story before. Christian filmmakers make a movie about themselves. The title: God’s Not Dead. The focus: Evangelical persecution in the United States. Their $2 million creation opens on the big screen. It grosses $60 million during its theatrical run. Two years later comes the sequel, God’s Not Dead 2. Okay, so maybe we haven’t heard this exact story before. So how did Pure Flix, the production company behind these films, strike gold? Film critic Alissa Wilkinson discusses this question with Morgan and Katelyn in the latest episode of Christianity Today’s weekly podcast, Quick to Listen. Wilkinson, CT’s critic at large, recently reviewed the film for Flavorwire and analyzed the film against the Christian movie genre for the Thrillist. (Wilkinson previously juxtaposed the original to Fifty Shades of Grey.) “In the Bible, winning looks very different for people than it does in this film,” Wilkinson noted about the movie, where a teacher goes to court after quoting from the Bible in her classroom. “Sometimes you won’t win, even if you believe all the right things and have your apologetics straight.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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More than 70 people died on Easter Sunday after Taliban suicide bombers blew themselves up at a children’s park in Lahore, Pakistan. The majority of the victims were Muslim, but its targets were Christians, a spokesperson for the terrorist group said. Life hasn’t been easy for Pakistani Christians in the past 50 years, says K. A. Ellis, an ambassador for the Christian persecution advocacy group, International Christian Response, who points to the country’s blasphemy laws and recent terrorist bombings of churches. “If it’s hubris to violate the image of God in any innocent being, it seems an even more profound offense to violate the name of Christ that believers bear,” says Ellis, a Ph.D. candidate in Church History at Oxford Center for Mission Studies. “God is grieved by the death of all men, but those who bear his name are precious in his sight.” Ellis joins Morgan and Katelyn this week as they process how Western Christians should grieve and act following this latest attack. What makes the Pakistan attack unique? What types of stories about persecution make the most prominent headlines? Should Christians grieve the death of other Christians differently than they do other victims? What can our support for persecuted Christians look like? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The ongoing Flint water crisis has reminded many of us of the role that government plays in providing water to the public. While evangelicals may not be inclined to see access to clean water as a faith or justice-based issue, Calvin College political science professor Kevin R. den Dulk makes a case for why Christians should care about the human “right to water”. “For Christians, access to water ought not be about the arbitrariness of birth and geography or the vagaries of power,” writes the Michigan-based professor for The Center for Public Justice. “It is a matter of justice, and our response is grounded in God’s call to seek shalom, in this case by addressing the access problems and inevitable conflicts that arise when a good is both basic and unevenly distributed.” On this week’s Quick to Listen, Kevin R. den Dulk joins Morgan and Katelyn to discuss the Flint water crisis through the lens of public justice. With the Flint crisis in mind, what do bodies “owe” us citizens? Is water a human right? What does a public theology of water look like? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Political Rallies. Black Lives Matter. March for Life. Westboro Baptist. If voting is the most popular way that Americans voice their concerns and frustrations, protests may be the second. (Time Magazine even named Ferguson protesters a runner up in its 2014 annual Person of the Year.) Jonathan Brooks, who leads Canaan Community Church on the city’s South Side, has experience organizing around issues of juvenile incarceration, inequitable school funding, and unfair policing practices. He’s also participated in several protests against police brutality after the city released a video showing a police officer shooting teenager Laquan McDonald 16 times last November. On this week’s Quick to Listen, Chicago pastor and community activist Jonathan joins Morgan and Katelyn to talk about protests. What makes a successful protest? Beyond protests, what other types of political actions must happen for social change? How do you define civil disobedience and how should Christians feel about it? We answer these questions, and preview CT’s April cover story on why all Christians should consider civil disobedience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices