Pilgrim at Plaster Creek

Christ comes to make all things new—even West Michigan’s most polluted watershed.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty / WikiMedia Commons

I live by a creek, Plaster Creek, in a former oak grove in West Michigan.

Every so often, I walk down a busy street in my part of Grand Rapids, past rows of brick and vinyl-sided houses, a church, and two schools, and turn onto a path that takes me to the sound of rushing water.

The creek is difficult to find unless you know where to look. Parts of its arms have long been buried in tunnels beneath the asphalt to make way for busy streets and big-box stores. Each time I reach it, my heartbeat quickens, as though I’m hearing the voice of a friend.

This friend is deathly ill. Its 25.9 miles of length is overrun with toxic substances, thermal pollution, and E. coli contamination—sometimes orders of magnitude higher than what is safe. When it rains, flash floods eat away at its jagged banks. The neglected undergrowth is caked in layers of old garbage, and plastic bags are caught in the branches of overhanging trees—many of which lie tipped on their sides, roots exposed. A sewage smell hangs in the air.

One early winter day last year, I arrived at the creek to find two rotting pumpkins sticking out of the water like orange sores. Human contact with the water is prohibited, so I simply stood on the bridge for a few moments.

Looking at the overwhelming list of creation care priorities—disappearing rainforests and glaciers, species on the brink of extinction, extreme weather patterns, the warming ocean—it would be easy to wonder why one creek should matter. But when I stand on the bridge over Plaster Creek, I am reminded that the story of humankind began near running waters like this one, in Eden, where Adam and Eve were formed in its heart and tasked with tending it.

Only after the Fall was humanity separated from the garden and its life, set at odds against each other and the earth. “Cursed is the ground because of you,” God says to Adam in Genesis 3 before he banishes man and wife, setting “a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life” (vv. 17, 24). Our rejection of God broke our relationship not only with him but with his creation. Millennia later, the proof is in the creek.

It’s true—gloriously so—that we are not condemned to remain in brokenness forever. We celebrate Christ’s incarnation in this season, and all around us are reminders that a return to God’s Edenic intent is nigh.

But that time has not yet come in full. We are still singing, “O come, O come, Emmanuel,” and all of creation joins us in our longing for the day when threat and decay will be no more and even the smallest creeks will be made new.

Two hundred years ago, Plaster Creek was called Ken-O-Sha (“water of the walleye”) by the Ottawa people who lived along its banks.

The Ottawa had a tenuous relationship with European settlers in the young city, as treaties were increasingly driving the Indigenous peoples farther west. Mayor Charles Belknap recounted a disagreement that happened during this time between an Ottawa elder named Mack-a-de-penessy (Chief Blackbird) and a Christian missionary.

Chief Blackbird said the best place to encounter God was outdoors; he couldn’t see why the missionary kept trying to convince his tribesmen to go inside a building. So the chief invited the missionary to come with him in his canoe to where the Ken-O-Sha met the Grand River. There, an impressive waterfall cascaded over a huge orange rock. This, the chief said, was where he and his people met the divine.

The missionary sent a sample of that outcropping to Detroit for analysis. The results confirmed that the rock was gypsum, a valuable resource used as a fertilizer and for making plaster. Until this time, plaster had been imported from as far away as Nova Scotia. But now it could be mined locally.

The first plaster mill in West Michigan opened on Chief Blackbird’s sacred spot in 1841. Not long after, Ken-O-Sha’s name was changed to Plaster Creek. By 1850, the company was mining 60 tons of gypsum a day, and by 1890, there were 13 mines in the area, shipping the resource as far away as California.

At the same time, the walleye fish that once teemed in the creek vanished, along with the Ottawa and other Indigenous groups. In 1910, one local, Charles W. Garfield, wrote, “Instead of being the beautiful even-flowing stream throughout the year, as in my childhood, [Plaster Creek] is now a most fitful affair. … A near sighted utilitarianism has snatched it away.”

As Grand Rapids moved on from gypsum mining to furniture making, the creek became a dumping ground for toxic waste. The poor water quality meant humans were not allowed to touch it, much less wade in it, while the nonhuman life in and around the creek suffered, including the endangered snuffbox mussel, sunfish, and salmon, as well as minks, herons, deer, and foxes. People growing up in the 1960s recalled that the creek would sometimes be bright red, sometimes green, from various paints poured into it, and there was always the lingering scent of lacquer.

By the early 2000s, Plaster Creek had become West Michigan’s most polluted waterway.

The creek in my neighborhood is only one example in a national epidemic. Today, nearly half of all rivers and streams and more than a third of all lakes in the US are so polluted that swimming and fishing in them are banned. A 2021 Gallup poll found that the pollution of drinking water—more than global warming, air pollution, or the extinction of plant and animal species—is the No. 1 environmental concern among American adults.

In 1975, Annie Dillard won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a poetic chronicling of her creek-side year in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. But even Dillard’s Tinker Creek was not immune to the effects of industrialization and pollution.

In 2012, Virginia was listed as the second-worst state in the country for toxic chemical dumping in waterways, with more than 18 million pounds of chemicals like arsenic, mercury, and benzene released annually into streams. In 2017, a chemical spill in Tinker Creek killed 40,000 fish, and in 2020, petroleum-based contaminants created a malodorous sheen on the water, resulting in a ban on human contact.

If Dillard had been writing her book in the 21st century, she may not even have been able to touch it.

Waterways like Plaster Creek are small veins in a huge system, but what happens in them has large-scale consequences. Plaster Creek empties into the Grand River, and the Grand River flows into Lake Michigan, connected to the other Great Lakes. Together, the lakes comprise nearly one-fifth of the planet’s total fresh water supply.

There is a long tradition, especially in America, of seeing the ideal state of nature as pristine and removed from the bustle of civilization, what some have called the “wilderness myth.” When Yosemite National Park was promoted to the American public, for example, it was portrayed as wild, unspoiled lands, intentionally wiped clean of traces of civilization. In truth, early photographers like Ansel Adams “assiduously avoided photographing any of the local Miwok who were rarely out of his sight as he worked Yosemite Valley,” noted journalist Mark Dowie.

Environmental historians like William Cronon have said that seeing nature in this idyllic way sets up a false, mutually exclusive dichotomy between nature and people, leading to neglect and exploitation. But there’s a theological dimension here too: The wilderness myth is not just wrong; it is unbiblical.

When God made the world, he did not put humans in one place and Eden in another. He formed man from the dust of the garden and said it was very good. And even after the Fall, when the Son of Man came to earth, he did not cut humans out of the picture. He united himself with us as a helpless baby, as a man who wept and ate and slept and prayed, as a man who died. There were no rose-tinted glasses or carefully filtered photographs when Jesus shouldered the full weight of creation’s sin and decay.

“In Jesus, God dwelt among us, taking on flesh and entering into creation, participating in the very life and matter of the world,” states Christian environmental group A Rocha International’s Commitment to Creation Care. And through Jesus’ death, “God defeated the power of sin and death and accomplished the reconciliation of all things—human and nonhuman—giving hope for all that is broken and spoiled, and eternal life to all who receive Him.”

In Christ, humanity—and all of creation—is not mythologized or cut out of a picture but redeemed. In Christ, God looks at all he has made and says once more that it is good.

And just as at the dawn of creation, his words have the power to enact what they pronounce.

One snowy Sunday afternoon, 40 members of my church donned work gloves and winter coats to pick up trash along two sections of Plaster Creek. Before heading out, my husband, the pastor, read from Our World Belongs to God, our denomination’s hymn-like articulation of Reformed confessions:

As followers of Jesus Christ,
living in this world—
which some seek to control,
and others view with despair—
we declare with joy and trust:
Our world belongs to God!

With this proclamation echoing in our ears, we reached the creek. The kids in our group treated the cleanup like a treasure hunt, comparing who could get the grossest find—my 9-year-old son proudly held up a dirty diaper while his friend boasted about a moldy bottle. On my way to drop off some glass shards in the sharps pile we had demarcated with a circle of twigs, a young woman in our group silently pointed out a person sleeping in the ledge beneath the bridge, wrapped in what looked like a large plastic sheet.

At the end of an hour, we filled the entire back of a van with stuffed trash bags. The group at the other section filled a trailer and a pickup truck. I overheard someone remarking in the parking lot, “We could have done this for four more hours and still picked up more trash.” Everyone’s cheeks were red in the blustery wind, and we blinked snowflakes out of our eyelashes.

In the early 2000s, Plaster Creek wasn’t on the radar of churches like ours, and no Christian organizations advocated on its behalf. That changed when Gail Heffner, then the director of community engagement for Calvin College (now Calvin University), together with Dave Warners, a Calvin ecology and biology professor, heard that the Plaster Creek watershed was “in really bad shape.”

Watersheds—areas of land that channel precipitation and runoff into a common body of water—are connected, like bowls that flow into larger bowls. More importantly, every human on earth lives in one. For Heffner and Warners, Plaster Creek wasn’t just any watershed—it was the one the college is located in.

“We started going to some community meetings just to listen, to find out what they were telling us,” Heffner said, shifting in her seat in the small conference room at Calvin’s Science Building where we met. “At that point, we didn’t know a lot about the Plaster Creek watershed.”

Most of the pollution in Plaster Creek today is not because of hazardous waste dumping like it was in earlier decades. That was curtailed by national laws like the Clean Water Act of 1972. Heffner and Warners learned the pollution was mostly caused by agricultural runoff from upstream areas south of Grand Rapids. When it rained, stormwater washed huge amounts of excess fertilizer in the form of high phosphorus and nitrogen content into the creek, which became increasingly polluted with livestock excrement, runoff sediments, garbage, and oils as it moved downstream into poorer urban communities like ours before joining the Grand River.

The upstream agricultural community was also made up of many Christians. In 2008, a senior staff member of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality turned to Warners and Heffner for help. “They said, ‘Look, there are Christians upstream who are refusing to listen to us,’” Heffner recalled. “‘But maybe they’ll listen to you.’”

Heffner and Warners launched Plaster Creek Stewards (PCS) shortly thereafter in 2009 as one of the country’s only Christian watershed programs and one of the few connected to a university. But they quickly found that few believers were interested in the health of the creek. In fact, some directly opposed the work of PCS, going so far as to send physically threatening messages to its staff.

One way to help decrease pollution in waterways like Plaster Creek is to slow down the flow of water coming into it in the first place. PCS thus focuses on installing porous parking lots, rain gardens, bioswales, retention basins, and floodplains. When PCS tried to install a large floodplain at a local park, however, widely circulating misinformation led the community to believe that their beloved Dutton Shadyside Park was about to be ruined.

“We learned the hard way that public projects require intensive listening to and partnering with the community,” Warners said.

After two years of wading through an appeal process in courts, PCS received a permit to proceed, with significant adjustments to honor some of the concerns expressed by the park users, like preserving several historical trees, keeping a green space for an annual dog show, and adding a new pedestrian bridge.

When construction finally began, hundreds of local students, churches, businesses, and neighbors came to help.

“In its consciousness, ours is an upland society,” essayist and poet Wendell Berry notes. Indeed, we are unaware of the outcomes of our consumptions and practices. “The ruin of watersheds, and what that involves and means, is little considered.”

Consciousness stirs when creation care is no longer an abstract concept but actual dirt on our hands. At our church’s cleanup event, my son, his bag of litter slung over one shoulder, looked up at me and said, “Mama, this is our creek, right?” An act as simple as picking up a soiled candy wrapper sends a message: I care about the cleanliness of this place. I care about it like it’s my own.

Churches, including ours, have found that this kind of hands-on care also resonates with the communities they’re trying to reach.

“We find that a lot of folks, [when] we’d say, ‘Come to our church picnic,’ they’d say, ‘No, thanks,’” shared one man interviewed by Heffner and Warners in their book, Reconciliation in a Michigan Watershed: Restoring Ken-O-Sha. But when neighbors would find out the church was going to clean up the creek, he said they’d respond, “‘Can I come with you?’ And then it is something that we are doing alongside our neighbors, [where] we get to illustrate God’s love for creation, and his love for this neighborhood.”

Restoring the creek is slow work. Contaminants in moving bodies of water are notoriously hard to measure due to their erratic fluctuations. “It’s taken several hundred years for the creek to get this bad,” Warners said. “It’s going to probably take several decades of concerted effort to be able to get it better.”

Some of the people most passionate about PCS’s work are young people. For many students, learning, research, and experimentation extend beyond academics. They’re a tangible act of caring for the earth among a generation where more than 4 in 10 say we’ve hit “the point of no return” with the environment, according to a 2021 Deloitte survey.

Engineering students at Calvin have built a hydraulic model of a section of the creek to aid research. History students have studied land-use patterns over time in the watershed. One year, a taxonomy group found beak grass, the only known patch of the endangered species in the county.

Warners recalls how one student came to his office firing off questions about PCS’s work before saying tearfully, “It’s been hard to have hope lately. But what you’re doing for this creek is beautiful.”

When we are children, our backyards and parks are our wildernesses—every tree and bush aflame with glory. I remember my siblings and I spending a summer hunched under the tent-like canopy of a pine tree, only several feet from the sidewalk, imagining that we were in a forest. In the winter, we tried our best to walk without a sound across the snow, exploring our tiny plot of land in an Ohio suburb. New discoveries—the long icicles on the edges of the house, the tracks of a creature leading into the brush—were as mysterious as finding a lamppost in the middle of a snowy wood.

Childlike wonder is something we as adults must relearn this side of the Resurrection: a re-visioning of nature as our home and our keeping, as something more like Eden, where creation flourished in the care of humankind.

Here in southeast Grand Rapids, that happens when I look up into the massive crown of the ancient oak tree in our yard and when I trace the hairline fractures in our old plaster walls. It happens each time I walk to our neighborhood creek and recall the vision in Revelation and what it means for creeks like this one.

Courtesy of Gail Gunst Heffner

College students collect data for a biology class at Plaster Creek.

It is a vision toward which all of history is pointing: a re-peopling of Eden, not as an untouched wilderness but as a garden-city through which runs the river of life, “clear as crystal” and “flowing from the throne of God” (Rev. 22:1). Along its banks will be planted the tree of life, the apostle John tells us, whose leaves will be used for the healing of the nations (v. 2).

That healing is not an abstract concept for nature “out there” and temporally far away. It is a promise for our own backyards, our neighborhood parks, our creeks—every place where we walk, day in and day out.

I have faith that when the new creation comes, the healing leaves will be brought to Plaster Creek too; that children, including my own, will be able to splash in its waters without fear. On that day, even the impossibly high cost of forgiveness for all that was wrought—the violent expulsion of the Ottawa, the exploiting of land and water, the conflicts that rend the body of Christ—will be paid for in full, even to overflowing.

Even now, there are glimmers of newness in every direction. Warners says that, in the spring, when new species of butterflies or birds visit native gardens they’ve placed in the neighborhoods alongside the creek, it’s like the triangle of God, humankind, and creation is restored. It’s then that he can keep hoping and working toward the day when Plaster Creek will be called “water of the walleye” again.

Meanwhile, each year in our neighborhood, I see more and more houses transforming the strips of grass between sidewalk and curb into rain gardens. Last summer, hundreds of community members painted a mural along a neglected 2,000-square-foot stretch of cement wall beside the creek. There are reports that sturgeon, another species of fish that disappeared, are returning to the Grand River.

On our neighborhood Facebook page, there’s a long thread about how we can care for those without homes camping near the creek, especially as winter draws near. Next summer, like every summer we’ve lived here, teams of high school students with PCS will walk laughing down the sidewalk outside my window with shovels in hand, off to sow more seedlings. People at our church are asking when the next cleanup day will be—pilgrims, all of us, beside Plaster Creek, waiting as we listen for resurrection to be spoken over every rivulet.

Sara Kyoungah White is an editor at Christianity Today.

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Biblical Archaeology Gets Subatomic Help

Gordon Govier

New tool finds use where digging is practically or politically impossible in Jerusalem.

Some of the ancient history underneath Jerusalem is easily accessible.

Pilgrims and tourists can get their feet wet in the Siloam Tunnel, carved by order of King Hezekiah to bring water inside the walls of the city (2 Kings 20:20). The Western Wall Tunnel, excavated in the late 20th century, traces a first-century street from the Western Wall to the path that Jesus is traditionally thought to have walked to his crucifixion. Archaeologists are currently excavating another street that pilgrims used in Jesus’ day to go from the Pool of Siloam (John 9:7) up to the Temple Mount.

But other parts of the city’s 5,000-year history are harder to get to—if not impossible. Practical and political problems prohibit access, even for the experts trying to do research.

Now, however, physicists have come up with a new way to dig without digging: muography.

Muons are tiny subatomic particles that are everywhere on earth, according to physicists. They are created when cosmic rays smash into the Earth’s atmosphere, showering the surface of the planet with about 10,000 of the particles per square meter.

In recent years, scientists have figured out how to use muon detectors to map inaccessible subterranean cavities, creating images of rooms inside Egyptian pyramids and magma chambers deep in volcanoes. Now they’re using them to map the streets Jesus once walked in ancient Jerusalem.

Last year, a team of Tel Aviv University archaeologists and physicists shoehorned an unwieldy homemade muon detector—you can’t buy one from a store—into a rocky cavern close to the Gihon Spring in the Kidron Valley. They placed another detector behind a rocky bulwark called the Stepped Stone Structure. Then they pointed them both toward the Temple Mount and turned them on.

Here’s how they work: Muons have about 10,000 times the energy of a typical x-ray. They can easily pass through rock and earth—and anything less dense, like plants and people—but the denser the material they pass through, the quicker they lose their energy.

When muons hit the detectors with different energy levels, an image can be created of the density of the matter through which they passed. Empty spaces are easily distinguished. And archaeologists can “see” underground.

Eventually the Tel Aviv team hopes to have 10 or more detectors near the Temple Mount, the contested holy site where traditional digging would create an impossible uproar.

“Jerusalem would seem to me to be as good a place as you could ever have for exploring this new technology,” said John Monson, professor of Old Testament and Semitic languages at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Monson grew up in Jerusalem, where his father taught at the Institute for Holyland Studies (now Jerusalem University College).

He can tell hundreds of stories about the biblical sites he visited as a child and later as a student and professor. He loves the history of archaeology and the evolution of archaeological methods. In many cases, Monson said, new discoveries have come through the development of new tools, which open up new ways of exploring.

“When you look at Jerusalem, exploration has been pushed forward by whatever technology has been available across the generations,” he told CT. “This looks to me to be a very, very promising tool.”

At the same time, Monson acknowledges that every technology has downsides. And there are always limitations.

That’s a caution echoed by Jodi Magness, author of the new book Jerusalem Through the Ages.

Magness, professor of early Judaism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says any kind of new technology will yield new information. But it may not be very much or very useful.

Archaeologists are already aware they won’t work in every situation. Muon detectors need to be placed beneath the areas they are imaging, which limits where they can be used. Also, each detector costs about $100,000 to build.

The new tool has other obvious limitations. Archaeologists may be able to see an image of a cavern, but the muon detector “won’t tell you what it is, or what its date is,” Magness said. “It can be used in conjunction with other methods, but it’s not going to be a substitute for them.”

It still may, however, lead to significant new discoveries. Israeli archaeologists have been peeling back the layers of history underneath what was once the Givati Parking Lot, just outside the Temple Mount area.

Their digging has discovered remains of palaces and other significant buildings, identified the location of the mysterious Acra fortress of the Maccabees, and revealed a previously unknown moat that defended the city, perhaps as far back as the time of David.

The opportunity to excavate such a comparatively large space in a city like Jerusalem is rare.

“Usually you’re just excavating one little part and trying to figure out what the rest is,” Magness said. “When you get the opportunity to excavate in a large area like this, you’re able to get a much bigger picture—a broader and more accurate picture.”

The muon detectors, as they’re currently deployed, are pointed toward an area next to the Givati excavation. Perhaps they will help answer some of the questions raised by the archaeologists digging in the parking lot. Perhaps they will show the length of the newly discovered moat.

Or perhaps archaeologists will make altogether new discoveries with muon detectors.

Wherever the technology leads, though, scholars are glad to have more options. It’s good, too, to have ways to see under the surface of the city that are less invasive than traditional means of uncovering the past.

“What we are doing in archaeology is essentially destructive when we dig,” Monson said. “Maybe muography offers … something that’s not destructive.”

Gordon Govier writes about biblical archaeology for Christianity Today, hosts the archaeology radio program The Book and The Spade, and is the editor of Artifax.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Seeing Under Jerusalem".

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Evangelicals Tap Power of the Sun—and Government Rebates

Daniel Silliman

More churches embracing solar power to care for creation and cut energy costs.

Campton Baptist Church used to have an annual fundraiser to pay the power bill. Heating the eastern Kentucky church building cost thousands of dollars every winter, and the small Southern Baptist congregation of about 25 didn’t get that kind of money in the collection plate.

Today, the church still has the fundraiser, but the money all goes to scholarships, helping young people from one of the poorest counties in America pay for the first year of college.

The church’s electricity bill is $0.

“We have 22 solar panels on our parsonage,” said Zach Collier, the church’s pastor, who also teaches science at the local high school and drives a school bus. “The main church building has 30 panels on one part, 28 on another, and then 20 on the education building. Enough to cancel out our utility bill.”

Campton is one of about 2,500 houses of worship that have switched to solar power in the last decade. Most are liberal Protestant: Quakers, Mennonites, Lutherans, and Episcopalians. But a handful of evangelical congregations have gone green too.

Baptists from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mojave Desert have hooked up solar arrays. The sun now powers a Bible church in central Pennsylvania, an Assemblies of God church in California’s San Joaquin Valley, a Christian Reformed Church in cloudy Michigan, and about a dozen other evangelical congregations.

The World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) once hoped to get 20 percent of its members converted to clean energy by 2025. They fell far short.

“It was aspirational,” Chris Elisara, executive director of the WEA’s Creation Care Task Force, told Christianity Today. “We just haven’t been able to follow through, to be frank. That was prior to COVID, and things pretty much shut down over COVID.”

But some evangelical congregations did move forward with solar power projects. And they are reaping the benefits.

Many of them are concerned about climate change and want to find ways to better steward God’s creation, but they are also motivated by practical realities and basic financial concerns.

“I don’t know many ministries that have tons of money,” said Allen Drew, a Christian Reformed Church pastor in Pennsylvania and a regional organizer for the denomination’s Climate Witness Project. “You have an open roof space? You have the capacity to generate revenue for the church and its ministry. Fund your ministry! God’s given you a fusion reactor in the sky. You just need a way to tap it.”

Accessing the power of the sun has gotten easier for churches since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. The legislation addressed environmental concerns more directly than economic ones (despite the name of the bill) and was hailed by President Joe Biden’s administration as “the most significant action Congress has taken on clean energy and climate change in the nation’s history.”

The new law included a provision offering rebates to nonprofits that install solar energy systems.

President George W. Bush signed a similar provision into law in 2005, giving tax credits to people installing solar setups on private residences. Industry experts say it had a dramatic impact. The total number of homes with solar panels increased from about 100,000 in 2005 to 3.2 million today. The Inflation Reduction Act could do something similar for churches.

Projects cost between $20,000 and $300,000, according to experts who spoke to CT. Now, churches can file tax forms to receive a 30 percent refund.

Interfaith Power and Light, a Washington, DC, nonprofit, has helped more than 30 congregations navigate the unfamiliar process.

“A church I was talking to recently had to figure out how to get a tax ID number,” said communications manager Jessica Quinn. “A lot of them don’t have one because they’re not taxed, but they have to file for tax credits through the direct pay program.”

Solar Faithful, a Muskegon, Michigan, company that specializes in working with religious organizations, has recently installed solar arrays for 10 congregations. All of them applied for and received government rebates. More than 150 other Michigan churches have reached out to Solar Faithful, expressing interest in getting solar power systems set up.

Churches generally pay for installation with a combination of building funds, special donations, and grant money. There are also more complicated financial arrangements that have emerged in recent years to make funding easier for churches:

The expertise and financing have been missing,” said Rob Rafson, president of Solar Faithful. “The Inflation Reduction Act has attracted a lot of finance groups to support development and even specialty financing, things like bridge loans—pieces of the financial puzzle that weren’t available before.

Solar Faithful sets up a power-purchasing contract with the churches, so they don’t have to pay anything up front. The company owns the solar panels on the church, and the church buys the electricity they generate, with prices guaranteed to be at least 10 percent below what they paid before.

That is an increasingly common financial arrangement.

Palm Valley Church in Goodyear, Arizona, recently agreed to a deal like this. The nondenominational megachurch worked with WattHub Renewables, a commercial developer, to install a 622-panel solar array on its vast, big-box roof. The panels are projected to reduce the church’s carbon emissions by about 375 tons per year and its energy bills by 30 percent.

Funding for the project was arranged by Sunrock Distributed Generation, a two-year-old company that specializes in financing this kind of development. Founder and CEO Wilson Chang said the company has successfully recruited major investors by packaging the small and medium-sized projects into investment funds that are very attractive on Wall Street.

“We’re putting it in a pool so there’s a very diversified risk,” Chang told CT. “At the end of the day, people pay their utility bills.”

The government rebate to offset initial costs makes the math even better for potential investors, Chang said. And it’s good for churches: They don’t have to pay anything up front, and solar panels help them hedge against rising energy prices.

Sunrock’s formula for calculating costs assumes that energy rates will increase about 3 percent per year. In 2022, however, consumers saw prices go up an average of 14 percent, more than twice the rate of inflation, according to government reports. Inflation is down in 2024, but electricity costs are still up nearly 4 percent for the year.

Aging power grid infrastructure could also cause prices to spike in the future, according to Chang.

“People want … to use clean power,” he said. “This will also save them money.”

There are other creative ways to finance solar power. Eight members of Bethany Christian Reformed Church in Gallup, New Mexico, started a limited liability company that paid to install 100 solar panels during a building renovation. It cost about $90,000, which was brought down to $63,000 by the rebate.

Now the group sells power to the church at a fixed price. They are not seeing the 5 percent returns they had originally projected, partly because they paid for more solar panels than they needed and the price the utility company pays for excess electricity is very low. They also set their rates low so Bethany saves more money.

That’s fine with Rick Kruis, the longtime member and retired doctor who headed up the project. He’s been working on creation care since he started a recycling program as a student at Dordt University.

“I’ve been a ‘tree hugger’ since college and before that, my dad was a lay preacher who installed solar in our home in the late 1960s,” Kruis said. “A lot of people in our congregation are concerned about the environment. We’ve talked a lot about climate change and creation care and wanted to do something.”

Even where climate change is not a top priority, however, more evangelicals are embracing solar power.

In eastern Kentucky, Southern Baptists don’t talk about the environment all the time. Collier, the pastor at Campton Baptist Church, told CT he couldn’t remember that he’d ever preached on the topic.

“Climate change is, by its nature, a slower process, so most people here don’t worry about it every day,” Collier said. “We do worry about whether we can pay the bills. We want to have more programs in our building and love our neighbors, and solar power helps with all of that.”

Daniel Silliman is senior news editor for Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Solar Money Empowers Churches".

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Soccer Fans Warned about Losing Souls

Daniel Silliman

And other news briefs from Christians around the world.

Illustration by Israel Vargas

Soccer fans who watched Spain celebrate its dramatic 2–1 victory over England in the European Football Championship also got an unexpected Bible message. The camera showed the trophy being engraved with the word Spain at the stadium in Berlin. Behind the engraver, Matthew 16:26 was written on the wall in German: “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” Most Spanish and British viewers couldn’t read the German, of course, but 67 percent of people living in Germany also watched the match. A majority of Germans say they have never read the Bible.

United Kingdom: ‘Gandalf’ church restored

Two churches in Kent have reopened as historic sites more than 650 years after they were shut down during the Black Death. One of them was built by a Norman monk named Gundulf—believed to be the inspiration for J. R. R. Tolkien’s character Gandalf.

Czech Republic: Theologians ID evangelicalism’s core

Evangelical theologians and Bible scholars gathered to discuss the definition and unity of evangelicals in Europe. Secularization, shifts in continental and global politics, and new criticisms of evangelical history have heightened the need for better articulation of core commitments. “We need to discuss again what is at the heart of evangelical belief and theology and what is more secondary,” said Dutch Bible scholar Gert Kwakkel. The meeting was organized by the Fraternity of European Evangelical Theologians, in cooperation with the European Evangelical Alliance and the Czech Fellowship of Evangelical Theologians. Papers presented at the five-day conference will be published in the future.

Ghana: Company triple tithes to build rural churches

A for-profit company announced plans to build 50 Assemblies of God churches and 50 two-bedroom parsonages as part of its tithe. First Sky Group is a holding company with subsidiaries involved in constructing roads, mining asphalt, selling energy, and running rural banks. In 2016, First Sky committed to a triple tithe, giving 30 percent of profits to “kingdom work.” The company supported the first kidney transplant clinic in West Africa. Now First Sky is building churches in rural areas where Christians are meeting in classrooms and under trees.

Uganda: Anglicans try to stop others from wearing vestments

The national Anglican Church has trademarked priests’ vestments in an attempt to stop evangelicals and Pentecostals from wearing the attire indicating ordination and office. Bishop Nathan Ahimbisibwe said people who are not Anglican priests have been abusing the vestments and the trademark gives the Church of Uganda a legal tool to stop it. “We wish to inform you that this is our attire so that once you are arrested, you will have no defense,” Ahimbisibwe said. At least one evangelical minister plans to sue.

Egypt: Christian man gets ID papers corrected

A Christian man had the religious affiliation on his national identification fixed 10 years after a clerical error accidentally listed him as a Muslim. Because of regulations on religious practice set by the Department of the Interior, the man could not send his children to a Christian school. His lawyers, working with the Alliance Defending Freedom International, say that repeated requests to fix the mistake were denied. Egypt has been criticized for making conversion technically impossible, despite guarantees enshrined in the constitution.

Nicaragua: Authoritarian crackdown hits Christian ministries

The government revoked the registrations of 695 religious nonprofits, continuing a yearslong crackdown on any part of civil society that can critique President Daniel Ortega. The official reason for shutting down the Catholic, evangelical, and Pentecostal groups was improper financial reporting. The government has now shut down more than 5,000 nonprofits. A United Nations spokesperson warned that civic space is being “fundamentally eroded.”

United States: Minister behind ‘Jesus Calling’ investigation leaves PCA

The teaching elder who called for the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) to investigate the orthodoxy of the devotional Jesus Calling has left the denomination. Benjamin Inman told his presbytery he has become convinced Christians should sing only the Psalms in worship and wants to transfer his ordination to the Reformed Presbyterian Church in North America. Before officially ending his PCA membership, he proposed the investigation of Jesus Calling—20 years after its publication and 10 months after the death of PCA author Sarah Young. The denomination approved the measure 947–834 at its annual meeting. Two committees will report back in 2025. Jesus Calling and its spin-offs have sold more than 45 million units in 30 languages, making it the bestselling devotional ever.

America average in prayer

Roughly half of the world prays more than Americans do, and half the world prays less. According to a Pew Research Center survey of more than 100 countries, 45 percent of all Americans pray daily, as part of any religion. That’s a bit higher than the rate in Romania and lower than in Armenia. People pray the most in Indonesia, Nigeria, and Senegal. They pray least in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Austria.

Hymn singing is good for heart health, study finds

A study of the physiological effects of vigorous singing found that belting out a tune for 30 minutes produced “acute improvements” in vascular blood vessels. Curiously, “Amazing Grace” improved heart health than other songs, including Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” and The Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” Researchers from the Medical College of Wisconsin say it’s too early to draw conclusions, but the findings “might be hypothesis-generating for future research in music medicine.”

Brazil: Most São Paulo evangelicals are Black women

A new study found that the largest group of evangelicals in São Paulo is Black women. According to a survey of city residents that included more than 600 self-identified evangelicals, evangelicals are 5 percentage points more likely than the general population to be female and 24 points more likely to be Black. One out of every four residents in the city is evangelical.

Vietnam: Imprisoned Christians are missing

Eleven Christians who are part of the Montagnard ethnic minority groups have gone missing in prison, according to International Christian Concern. Five Indigenous Protestants and six Catholics, part of an ethnic group that allied with the US during the Vietnam War and converted to Christianity in large numbers, were arrested about 10 years ago for “undermining national unity policy.” Their churches are not allowed to register with the government. The 11 have been sentenced to more than 90 years combined. But now their locations in the prison system are unknown, raising concerns about their well-being.

India: Hindu nationalist speaks against evangelism

A Hindu nationalist leader speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in the United States said the relationship between the US and India could be improved if Westerners would stop funding evangelism in India. Hindu nationalism is quite tolerant, according to Bharatiya Janata Party leader Swapan Dasgupta, but “the idea of converting to another faith” is considered “abhorrent.” Dasgupta said nationalists in the US and India have a lot in common and encouraged people at the conference to stop supporting evangelicals.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Unexpected Bible message at Euro Cup".

- More from Daniel Silliman

News

Winning the Pro-Life Battles, Losing the Persuasion War

Daniel Silliman

Americans support right to abortion more than any time in recent history.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

The pro-life movement won a historic victory at the US Supreme Court with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. It has not, however, won over many hearts and minds. In fact, polls show a substantial shift in opinions on abortion for the first time in decades—more people now believe abortion is a right that should not be restricted.

When George W. Bush was running for president, he said the only way to build a lasting culture of life in a democracy is to persuade people, winning voters over to the pro-life position. If that’s true, then the recent success of the defenders of the unborn may turn out to be hollow.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Pro-Life Victories May Not Be Viable".

- More from Daniel Silliman

Church Life

Do I Have to Go to Church with My Folks?

Beth Moore, Kevin Antlitz, and Kiara John-Charles

CT advice columnists also weigh in cringing at Christianese and the importance of attraction.

Illustrations by Marcos Montiel

Q: After I moved away, my parents joined a church in a different denomination from the church of my childhood. If I’m visiting at Christmas or Easter, am I obliged to attend with them? I’d much rather go to a local congregation in my church’s tradition, but I know my parents want me to come meet their new friends and pastor. —Troubled in Texas

Beth Moore: God alone knows how many people are struggling with the same question amid culture wars, divisions, and honest differences in generational perspectives.

Your family is a step ahead if you’re planning holidays together, and you should be free of obligation to attend your parents’ church. No one in my four family groups attends the same denomination; I’m just glad they like their churches!

I’d advise grappling prayerfully with three questions, though: Would your parents be offended if you didn’t attend? How offended? And if your answers are yes and very, is it worth it?

On the other hand, if you already know their church would bring out the worst in you (a danger to your parents’ hearts) or bring out your fight-or-flight response (a danger to your own heart), it’s wisest and most loving to attend different churches.

But keep in mind that, often, it’s not just what we do but how we do it. Might you be willing to say some version of this? “I love you dearly, and I love that you love your church, but I’d like your blessing to attend my own tradition this holiday.”

You’re a full-grown adult. You don’t need your parents’ permission to follow your convictions! But asking their blessing might soothe the sting. And if they give it, their blessing this time may free you up to bless them another time.

Beth Moore and her husband, Keith, reside outside Houston. She has two daughters and an armful of grandchildren. Beth leads Living Proof Ministries, helping women know and love Jesus through Scripture.

Q: My church is leaning into cringey “Christianese” to the point that church life drastically differs from normal human interactions. Sermon points are forced into rhyme; women’s events center on flowers and men’s on grilling; and we were told to be intimate “prayer sisters” with people we’d just met. Am I wrong to be uncomfortable? —Muddled in Michigan

Kevin Antlitz: I believe I was born again with an allergy to Christianese. Not long after my conversion in high school, I had the chance to share about a church retreat I’d attended. I said I felt “on fire for Jesus” then added—with a straight face—that I was excited to go light my friends on fire. I’m not sure if my hearers knew I was being cheeky.

Why do Christians talk and act like this? The same reason most groups develop shared habits: Common language and practices bind us together and foster belonging.

Theologians have likened conversion to becoming fluent in a new language. We learn the stories, symbols, and habits of Christianity the way we acquire a new tongue. Much of this is inevitable and good.

But groups also tend to drift toward jargon and cliché. This is not so good, and it ultimately makes the church less hospitable. It excludes people unnecessarily and makes belonging more difficult.

From the outside looking in, there’s already enough about Christianity that can seem foreign and hard to understand (2 Pet. 3:16). We needn’t make it less accessible by peddling cringe or reinforcing stereotypes. You’re not wrong to feel uncomfortable.

To riff on Marilyn McEntyre’s Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, I encourage you to care for words in a subculture of cringe. Call your church to the missionary task of translating the gospel into language that resonates with your neighbors. And who knows? Maybe one day you and your prayer sisters can meet over steaks.

Kevin Antlitz is an Anglican priest at a Pittsburgh church positively overflowing with kids. He and his wife have three children under ten, whom they pray will never know a day apart from Jesus.

Q: I’m in my early 30s and want to get married. I’ve been seeing a Christian guy I really respect, but I’m not sure I find him attractive or feel like we have a connection. How important is this when our values and lifestyles align? Would I be settling if I made it work? Would I be letting a good match go if I stopped seeing him? —Doubtful in Delaware

Kiara John-Charles: I empathize with your urgency to marry in your early 30s. And I’m sure you’ve heard advice like, “Don’t be too picky.” “At least he’s Christian.” “Don’t make marriage an idol.”

This guidance is based in some truth—sometimes we are too picky, shared faith is important, and nothing should rival our worship of God—but it isn’t always enough. Shared values and lifestyle are foundational to marriage, but they don’t guarantee compatibility. After all, there are likely multiple people in your church who fit these criteria.

You should genuinely enjoy the person with whom you plan to spend the rest of your life. Our society can reduce attraction to superficial concerns, but personality, presence, and temperament matter. So does the sense that your spouse values and cares for you.

Consider how you’d feel if the Christian guy you’ve been seeing said of you, “I respect her, but I’m not sure I find her attractive or feel like we have a connection.” Would you want your future husband to think of you this way?

Marriage is a covenant that reflects God’s love (Eph. 5:25–33), and we should enter into it with reverence, not halfheartedly. “Settling” is in the eye of the beholder, and perhaps your connection will grow if you make it work with this person. But you deserve to marry someone whom your heart loves (Song 3:4), and so does he.

Kiara John-Charles is an LA native with Caribbean roots and a love for travel and food. She works as a pediatric occupational therapist and serves at her local church in Long Beach, California.

Got a question for CT’s advice columnists? Email advice@christianitytoday.com. Queries may be edited for brevity and clarity.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Qualms & Proverbs".

Qualms & Proverbs: Got a question for CT’s advice columnists? Email advice@christianitytoday.com. Queries may be edited for brevity and clarity.

Theology

The Consolation of Providence

Brad East

Contributor

The doctrine of God’s wise and sovereign governance doesn’t make history easy to interpret. It makes living through it endurable.

Illustration by Matt Chinworth

Christians believe in providence, which holds that God is the wise and sovereign governor of all creation. But what is providence for?

Unlike some doctrines, this one refuses to stay in the study or pulpit. Providence makes public claims—about the public, the shared space and time in which we all live together. It gets called in to do work whenever something momentous happens.

Not just Christians, but most people look at an event and point and wonder, Is this the work of God? And if so—or at least, if it unfolded in accordance with God’s purposes—does that give the event a stamp of divine approval?

That’s what many of us are after, if we would admit it: confidence that God is with us, with our tribe, or with our country. Though often bent into a too-narrow shape, this longing is the right one; it’s an instinctive search for Immanuel. It’s a question, therefore, that we should keep asking, but we should do so while on guard against easy answers or convenient solutions.

Claims and counterclaims of providential affirmation invariably intensify during election seasons and the interregnum period that follows. And this political year has been especially rocky. A presidential candidate was nearly assassinated—more than once. The sitting president announced he would not run for reelection. November was heralded, as it is every cycle, as the most important vote of our lifetime, its stakes existential.

I’m writing these words before that vote is counted, and you’ll likely read them after the winner—and whatever else awaits us between Election Day and the Inauguration (not to say Judgment Day)—is revealed. But the very point of the doctrine of providence is that I don’t need to know that outcome to trust that God will be with us in the weeks to come.

In fact, the doctrine of providence has a number of roles to perform, and one of them is to turn down the volume on the frantic speculation to which we are prone in such moments. Providence isn’t a decoder ring for history, and it certainly isn’t for the present. To switch metaphors, it’s got bigger fish to fry.

But that’s not to downplay its power. Providence is a lifeline for Christians in a fallen world where chaos threatens to overwhelm us. But we need to understand what it is and what it teaches before we can receive the consolation it is meant to offer.

Providence begins and ends with God, his identity and activity. God alone is maker, sustainer, and savior. “For all the gods of the nations are idols, but the Lord made the heavens” (Ps. 96:5). Loving what he has made, God rules wisely over his creation. As part of his rule, he orders all things to their final end in himself.

Providence is the word Christians use for this hidden, ordered provision guiding history to its appointed terminus. Every book of the Bible testifies to this divine prudence, though one could construct a theology of providence out of nothing but the Psalms, perhaps even Psalm 104 alone. There we learn of God’s universal creative power, his unrivaled sovereignty, and his immediate, active care:

These all look to thee,
to give them their food in due season.
When thou givest to them, they gather it up;
when thou openest thy hand, they are filled with good things.
When thou hidest thy face, they are dismayed;
when thou takest away their breath, they die and return to their dust.
When thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created;
and thou renewest the face of the ground. (vv. 27–30, RSV)

Absent the Lord’s hand, the history of not only humanity but the whole universe would be meaningless. Lacking all order, it would have no
rationale or goal.

Thankfully, the universe is not meaningless. God’s providential care is boundless. “All things are subject to divine providence,” writes medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae, “not only in general, but even in their own individual selves.” Or take Augustine in the fifth century, in a more elaborate passage from his treatise On the Trinity:

The whole of creation is governed by its creator, from whom and by whom and in whom (Rom 11:36) it was founded and established. And thus God’s will is the first and highest cause of all [creatures and events]. For nothing happens visibly and in a manner perceptible to the senses which does not issue either as a command or as a permission from the inmost invisible and intelligible court of the supreme emperor, according to his unfathomable justice of rewards and punishments, favors and retributions, in what we may call this vast and all-embracing republic of the whole creation.

Let me unpack these claims, because although they are dense, they are universal across Christian tradition. Three are paramount, and simply stated.

First, God’s providence is comprehensive; nothing is excluded from it. Second, God wills some things actively, and these are “incontrovertibly good,” as the seventh-century monk John of Damascus puts it in Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. Third, God permits other things, and these are defects, errors, sufferings, or evils, including those of the political variety.

At this point, differences arise between theologians and denominations—the position of sin in relation to God’s plan, the reason he allows evil, and the role and character of fallen human will—but agreement is firm on this point: Nothing falls outside the sovereign power of God. Nothing is outside his providential grasp. If anything were, then some things would exceed his reach. And if that were true, God would be unable to save us. Either providence is all-encompassing or our redemption is in jeopardy.

That’s not to say the world is as it should be. If it were, Jesus wouldn’t command us to pray that God’s kingdom come and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven (Matt. 6:10). Such a prayer would be redundant if the status quo left nothing to be desired. In that case, earth would already be heaven.

But providence holds together two truths in a single mystery: Regarding God, “everything that he wills comes to pass,” John of Damascus says. If that weren’t true, God wouldn’t be God. God is good and does good; he abhors sin; he cannot be an author of evil.

Regarding us, we do what is wrong: We sin, transgress, and turn away from God’s love. And because of our first sin, this world is sunk in evil and death—the two very enemies opposed to life that God sent his Son to defeat.

Taken together, it appears that the horizon of God’s will overlooks or permits—with patience but never resignation—rebellion and defection from his manifest purposes for our good. But he never causes, desires, or blesses those evils.

Hence, providence does not mean that evil does not happen. Providence means that evil is not ultimate, that it does not and will not have the last word. It means, further, that in spite of the evils we witness and suffer, God has not abandoned us; the story is not without a plot; the author has not lost control of his narrative.

As theologian John Webster puts it in an essay on the doctrine, “Providence is not asserted on the basis of the insignificance of evil but on the basis of the belief that God outbids any and all evil.”

Indeed, in his famous treatise on The Bondage of the Will, Reformer Martin Luther once observed that if all we had to go on was the evidence of the world, we would conclude that God is evil or must not exist.

Providence, therefore, is not an empirical doctrine; it’s not a reasonable guess based on the way our lives go. Rather, it’s a confession of faith in God incarnate, the God of Calvary, whose death on a cross seemed to almost every onlooker to refute his message.

Providence, in short, makes a promise. It says that human history may sometimes seem like one long crucifixion, but at the end of it lies an empty tomb. Confidence in providence thus begets perseverance. It takes God at his word no matter how dark life becomes.

According to each of the theologians I’ve cited, the truth of providence has great theological stakes because it is rooted in the nature of God, both his goodness and his power. His goodness, because the evils of the world seem to belie it; his power, because none but God can bring good out of evil. The watchword for providence in all ages is Joseph’s response to his brothers: You intended it for evil, but God intended it for good (Gen. 50:20).

John of Damascus saw two sides to providence: a practical charge and a theoretical danger. On one hand, with a view to the life of faith, he writes that “when they are accepted with thanksgiving, all the vexatious things that happen to us are laid upon us for our salvation and most certainly become occasions of benefit for us.” On the other hand, he warns that “the ways of God’s providence are many and can neither be explained in words nor grasped by the mind.”

Put these together, and you come to see that providence is a call not for speculation but for action. It is a gospel truth built on the rock of Good Friday and Easter Sunday, meant for our consolation and hope in the face of trials, sufferings, and calamities. Providence names a mystery deep in the heart of the church’s life, one that explains her courage, her boldness, her stubborn refusal to shrink back from faith. Providence is a secret whispered from one martyr to another until the end of time.

We’re now far afield from contemporary political turmoil, and rightly so. The church’s teaching about providence preexists American and modern politics. It stands wholly independent of the day’s news.

In the summer of 1933, following Hitler’s rise to power and the Nazis’ intrusion into church affairs, Swiss theologian Karl Barth composed a plea for Christians to stay faithful to the gospel. He asserted that, for his part, he would carry on with theology as if nothing had happened.

This bald claim has scandalized many of his readers over the past century, even as it did at the time. But Barth didn’t mean that Christ-ians should remain aloof from the events of their era. This is the same man, after all, who the following year helped draft the Barmen Declaration against Nazi influence in the German churches. By saying he would carry on as if nothing had happened, then, Barth meant that the gospel stands or falls on its own terms, not the world’s.

The axis of history turns on the resurrection of Jesus. If Hitler or Stalin could bend the arc of history to their will—if theology had to “change” in light of later events—then God would not be sovereign. A rival would sit on the throne, and our trust in his promise would be called into question.

Providence, therefore, is not affected by the news. But neither is it rendered inert by current events. True, we’re not meant to speculate; that would mean looking at providence rather than using it, properly, as a lens to view our lives. Looking through providence, we see a fallen creation governed by its loving Lord, not random atoms colliding aimlessly or human happenings devoid of meaning and, often, full of terror.

This is why it is perfectly reasonable for people to wonder about God’s involvement in shocking, significant, unexpected, or improbable events. The conversion of Constantine, the fall of Rome, the battle of Tours, the rout of the Spanish Armada, the evacuation of Dunkirk—many Christians, rightly or wrongly, believed they could discern the Lord’s hand in these events.

The trick is to avoid cherry-picking. Vulgar providentialism sees the smile of heaven in any happy occurrence and its absence whenever things—whether in reality or from our own perspective—go wrong. Worse, such convenient providentialism can become confirmation bias projected onto history: When my guy wins, when my policy passes, when my promotion goes through, I know that I was right because God is telling me so. Of course, when my guy loses or my policy fails or my promotion stalls, I don’t assume I was wrong all along. I know that life’s not that simple.

Here’s the difficult truth: The sheer fact that something has happened—that God willed or allowed it to happen—tells us nothing whatsoever about the thing itself. It may be a cause for celebration or lament or, more likely, a mixture of both. On their own, events are illegible. We may never know in the moment what God is up to, much less how God might work good out of some bewildering or shocking occurrence.

Wise discernment and faithful response are a long game, so long that you and I may not live to know the answer. Sifting history for the work of God is thus a task for a community, not an individual, over a span of centuries, not weeks or months or the few moments it takes to post on social media. At any given time, what seems like a very good thing may turn out for ill, just as a very bad thing may turn out for blessing. The people of God must be patient. Spiritual hindsight is the prerogative of the church, and even then it’s touch and go.

For these reasons, providence is an ill-shapen tool for imprinting Christ-ian approval on current events, and this realization should help believers turn popular recourse to providence inside out. Far from a means of explaining why something has happened, it should instead become an occasion for humility: We simply do not know. Our trust in God remains unshaken, but rarely if ever can we predict or unveil his purposes with confidence. We know the final outcome—each of our graves vacant in a flash (1 Cor. 15:52)—not the twists and turns by which it will arrive.

Scripture supplies many examples of this fundamental ambiguity of providence. Foreign empires appear on Israel’s borders. Is this from God? Yes, it is. They threaten to attack God’s people. Is this too from God? Yes—though repentance could change their fate. Soldiers lay waste to the temple and perpetrate injustice against the innocent. Could this also be from God? Well, the answer is complicated. Isaiah 47 reveals that God did employ the Babylonians to punish Israel but they went too far; now he will raise up another empire to punish them for their transgressions.

Or consider ancient Israel’s monarchy. A line of kings is a key component of God’s purposes for Jacob’s children, for it will culminate in Jesus. Yet when the people beg for a king, it is an act of mistrust on their part; they spurn the Lord in order to be like the other nations (1 Sam. 8:4–9). And as it turns out, Saul, David, and many of David’s descendants often prove disastrous for Israel. The lesson for us: Be careful what you wish for. And perhaps also: Be cautious in divining the Lord’s will. In the moment, it may seem clear what he is doing and why. In the long run, though, you may live to regret your rush to judgment.

And yet: Out of the long disaster of the Davidic kingship God brought Jesus, the Son of David and the final king of Israel. It only took a thousand years. Perhaps it will likewise take a millennium for keen-eyed observers to gain true clarity on our own political trials and conflicts.

In any case, the rule stands: For all Christians, whether Calvinist or Methodist, Catholic or Baptist, providence is by nature ambiguous. God permits things; God wills things; God does things. We do not always know which is which, and we very rarely know why—and never without a long backward glance. Even when we are sure God’s hand was at work in an event, his purposes are likely to be obscure, especially to contemporaries.

We must remember to root the doctrine of providence in the good news of Christ—his cross and resurrection, his love and promises for his people, his pledge to be with us to the end. Recast in that light, providence doesn’t make history easy to interpret. It makes living through it endurable.

Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Our Strength and Consolation".

- More from Brad East

Books

Review

What to Salvage from Fundamentalism

Matt Reynolds

Like Richard Mouw, I’m reluctant to discard everything about this flawed heritage.

Illustration by Tara Anand

In a fallen world, reform efforts never perfectly hit their marks. They address one problem only to sow the seeds of others. Or they so aggressively attack an infection that they weaken or destroy what’s healthy and vital.

Blunders in this delicate dance between correction and overcorrection are familiar in the political arena. Yet the same pattern is found in matters of religion, as Reformation people can readily understand.

Around a quarter century ago, theologian Richard Mouw wrote a short book surveying the evangelical landscape of that time. He had much to celebrate. But he worried that evangelicalism had too thoroughly eclipsed the fundamentalism that preceded it. His reflection, titled The Smell of Sawdust: What Evangelicals Can Learn from Their Fundamentalist Heritage (2000), models a healthy approach to reckoning with a flawed past that still tugs on your heartstrings.

In one sense, evangelicalism has existed ever since Jesus first gave us the Good News to share with the world. As a contemporary movement, however, it emerged in the 20th century as a correction to the fundamentalist overcorrection.

As I never tire of reminding those who casually deploy fundamentalist as a slur, the term is no mere synonym for Bible-thumping zealot. Fundamentalism responded to the late 19th-century advent of “modernist” Christianity, which reengineered supernatural elements—like Jesus’ virgin birth or bodily resurrection—that offended science-loving contemporaries.

Fundamentalists drew essential lines in the sand. (The name derives from The Fundamentals, an essay collection defending core Christian doctrines.) But over time, they turned quarrelsome and insular, growing preoccupied with moral-purity tests and esoteric threads of Bible prophecy. Rattled by cultural rejection, they devoted more energy to speculating about the world’s demise than to shining the light of Christ within it.

The Smell of Sawdust asked evangelicals at the turn of this century: Are you flirting with overcorrection?

For Mouw, the subject is deeply personal. Born in 1940, he grew up immersed in a tight-knit fundamentalist world. He learned dispensational theology at its Bible conferences, staffed kitchens at its summer camps, and inhaled the aroma of its revival tents, which his title evokes.

Like many believers of his generation, however, Mouw ended up charting a different course. Anxious to avoid modernist heresies and fundamentalist habits of cultural retreat, he took the “neo-evangelical” path that launched leaders like Billy Graham, publications like Christianity Today, and institutions like Fuller Theological Seminary (where Mouw served 20 years as president).

Mouw doesn’t regret that journey. In fact, much of the book champions evangelical achievements. But for all this, he retains a sense of “indebtedness to … the fundamentalism that nurtured me in my early years.”

My own childhood had few, if any, fundamentalist hallmarks. Still, The Smell of Sawdust moved me to ask which features of that inheritance may be worth salvaging. I can’t cover everything here, but 25 years after Mouw’s book, I’ll propose three areas where the pendulum might be swinging too far toward overcorrection.

The first concerns personal piety and morality. Fundamentalists weren’t shy about setting behavioral boundaries. That often led to legalistic dead ends and petty judgmentalism about drinking, dancing, cards, and other presumed gateways to naughtiness. But they weren’t wrong to guard against a sinful world’s enticements.

My wife and I sometimes joke about evangelical writers enlisting the Incarnation as a versatile moral permission slip. Jesus lived on earth, you see, which means the world is good, not tainted. Presto! A handy rationale for tasting its fruits with an untroubled conscience.

That’s a caricature, of course. Rightly understood, evangelicalism rejects antinomian license and follows Jesus in looking at the heart’s posture. I don’t want evangelicals to be known primarily for the priggish hang-ups of yesteryear. But when I think of how I’ve reassured irreligious friends with my conspicuous lack of hang-ups, I worry I’m failing to seek the set-apartness that God commands of his people.

Second, I’ve come to value fundamentalist warnings about the pitfalls of intellectualism. Contrary to the lunkhead stereotype, Mouw notes that fundamentalists often brought prodigious intellectual energy to their pursuits. At their worst, they also cultivated an unhealthy suspicion of secular knowledge as a distraction, an irrelevance, or a rival to biblical authority.

That mindset clashes with my dearest convictions about the inherent goodness of reading and learning. Mouw has little patience for it either. But he shows where the fundamentalist caution is worth heeding: Theology can lodge in the head without transforming the heart, and some strains of Enlightenment rationalism do rule out religious belief.

I’d add another danger of intellectualism, one that rises as we evangelicals ponder our place in America’s social hierarchy. Evangelicals should always obey God’s call to renew the mind. But when braininess functions as a status symbol, intellectual ambitions can devolve into quests for esteem from secular peers or distance from fellow evangelicals.

Finally, I think we could stand to recover something of the fundamentalist emphasis on the eternal fate of individual souls.

Mouw writes of revivalistic altar calls “where people were encouraged to make deep and abiding commitments.” He knows, of course, that emotional appeals can yield ephemeral professions of faith. He knows, too, that cathartic moments of conversion can’t substitute for regular church fellowship and patient discipleship. But he helpfully stresses the high stakes involved. It matters whether people get saved!

Obviously, evangelicals believe this. But in recent years, evangelical leaders have taken great pains to portray the cosmic scope of God’s redemption. God isn’t just gathering lost souls and depositing them in paradise. He’s renewing creation itself and reigning as King forevermore.

I want pulpits to ring out with this glorious message. But I cringe at the thought of dismissing a perennial source of existential dread—What happens after I die?—as selfish or unimportant. The gospel promises abundantly more than “going to heaven,” but surely not less.

I give thanks for the evangelical tradition, warts and all. But like Mouw, I remain grateful for the fundamentalist streams still nourishing it. Yes, you’ll find some corroded junk in those waters. But also some precious gems.

Matt Reynolds is senior books editor at CT.

The Beckoning Nightstand

- More from Matt Reynolds

Culture

The Light of the World Is for Everyone

Malcolm Guite

Those who do not yet share our faith can share our wonder at the beauty and comfort of light in the darkness.

Illustration by Stephen Procopio

The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned.” This luminous verse in Isaiah 9 is traditionally read at Advent as we look forward to the coming light of Christ.

For those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere, this passage is especially apt, as the whole celebration of Christmas in midwinter has an extra layer of meaning, a kind of parable from nature to underline and emphasize the prophecy of Isaiah.

Isaiah is speaking of the darkness of exile, the darkness of our fall, and—at the root of it all—the thick, clotted darkness of sin. This is the darkness that Christ comes to dispel, and John, perhaps remembering this verse in Isaiah, tells us that the light shines in darkness and the darkness has never overcome it (John 1:5).

To hear these readings in the dark time of the year, when the nights draw in and help us see the light more brightly, reminds us of the final triumph of the inextinguishable light of Christ—not just in our heads, but in our hearts; not just by reason, but by a kindled imagination.

When a child comes up in church to light an Advent candle, the gospel is known not only with the mind but with the body as well. And that is especially important as we celebrate the Incarnation, the astonishing truth that God became one of us, that he who is the Light of the World was once as young and vulnerable as the child who lights the candle.

As a poet, I have found myself drawn again and again to “the light within the light by which I see,” as I put it in one of my Advent sonnets. The light that shines in darkness is also an image, a living symbol, to which everyone responds.

Some time ago, I wrote a winter blessing. I wanted to frame my blessing in such a way that it could be shared, perhaps at a candlelit dinner table, with those who do not yet share our faith. I wanted to invite conversation about who the “winter child” really is. Those who do not yet share our faith can share our wonder at the beauty and comfort of light in the darkness, from the stars in the heavens to the candlelight at a service or over a shared meal.

Winter Benediction

When winter comes and winds are cold and keen,
When nights are darkest, though the stars shine bright,
When life shrinks to its roots, or sleeps unseen,
Then may he bless and bring you to his light.
For he has come at last, and can be seen,
God’s love made vulnerable, tightly curled:
The Winter Child, The Saviour of The World.

Malcolm Guite is a former chaplain and life fellow at Girton College, Cambridge. He teaches and lectures widely on theology and literature.

“Winter Benediction” was originally commissioned for Cultivating magazine and published by Cultivating Oaks Press. Used with permission.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Winter Child".

- More from Malcolm Guite

Culture

Illustrating the Incarnation

Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt

How art testifies to the incredible truth of Christ with us.

Illustration by Abigail Erickson / Source Images: The Met, Julia Hendrickson

In my art history classroom, I dim the lights and turn on the projector. The image pools on the screen at the front of the room. The heaviness of another news cycle, along with my own family’s fragile health, weighs on me like the thick, damp fog blanketing the college campus where I work. But along with my students, I begin searching the picture on the screen.

We are not looking for a hidden Da Vinci Code cipher or a proof of artistic genius. As we study images of crisp frescoes and architectural ruins, we are seeking out the ripples of Christ’s incarnation.

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us,” the apostle John writes (John 1:14). Jesus, the eternal God, born of a woman, settles in our material, temporal existence. The Incarnation dignifies and reaffirms God’s commitment to the world that he made and that he promises to make whole again. He does not abandon us to our despair but enters into it. Humans’ ability to make art—to materialize meaning—is an echo of not only a creator God but also an incarnate God.

As I leave the classroom, the day’s weightiness still hovers, but it is also pierced. Again and again, art renews and expands my wonder over the miraculous reality of the Incarnation: God with us, a light shining in the darkness. The art I love best invites me to hold things in paradox.

As theologian William Dyrness writes, “[Art] shows us something we can learn in no other way.” Two very different artworks that reference “God with us,” made hundreds of years apart, suggest both the challenge and possibility of this endeavor.

Learning from art in this way might not come easily to us. Our limited expectations of how works of art function might also truncate our understanding of the Incarnation.

Take, for example, the Annunciation Triptych, a 15th-century altarpiece made for a Flemish home by the workshop of Robert Campin. The center panel of the small devotional object depicts Gabriel’s announcement to Mary. The archangel kneels on the left side of the composition and addresses a seated Mary. We can almost hear Gabriel speaking the words from Luke’s gospel: “You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus” (1:31).

Meanwhile, Jesus himself—represented as a miniscule alabaster-white infant carrying a tiny wooden cross—bursts through a window above Gabriel’s head and zips through the air on a sharp, downward diagonal. If we trace the implied line of his descent, we find that he is heading straight for Mary’s womb. To our 21st-century eyes, it is an incredibly strange, even humorous, image.

We might think that the artists of the Annunciation Triptych are offering us an extremely literal illustration. It’s as if they thought, Well, the Incarnation is God with us, so here’s a picture of God on his way to be with us. Very little imagination is required; the painting’s meaning appears to sit on the surface.

The Met

Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece) by Robert Campin circa 1427–32

We may interpret the painting in this way because we are familiar with pictures that directly tell us something: Advertisements and explainer graphics constantly announce what we should buy, who we should desire, and how we should think. If that is what we expect of images, then that is all we will see in the Annunciation Triptych. And thus, Incarnation becomes limited to a specific narrative moment rather than functioning as a cosmic folding of time and eternity. Wonder trickles away, absorbed by a dogmatic diagram.

There is much more to see in the Annunciation Triptych. But first we need a better way of seeing. Visual artworks do not merely tell us things; they can also form us.

The work of California-based contemporary artist Julia Hendrickson also invites us into the wonder of the Incarnation. Hendrickson is a Christian, and her practice emerges from her faith commitments.

In Hendrickson’s abstract watercolor paintings, feathery tendrils spread like frost across indigo fields. Nets of light pierce midnight clouds. Stars shimmer on a dark pond. We are looking, it seems, at both the entire universe and the tiniest sliver of reality, something that is simultaneously a magnificent galaxy and a magnified drop of water. Our imaginations prickle. What else are we looking at? What artistic alchemy made this possible?

Affection (from the What Lies Beneath series), Julia Hendrickson, watercolor and salt on paper, 22″ x 30″, 2023.

The first paradox of Hendrickson’s work is how she mines seemingly endless variation from a limited process and set of materials. Much of Hendrickson’s daily work follows a rhythm that she frequently documents and shares online. She soaks her thick white paper with wide brushstrokes of water. Then, she repetitively brushes, dabs, or splatters a single hue of watercolor: the warm blue of Payne’s grey.

Finally, while the surface is still wet, Hendrickson sprinkles salt on the pooling paint. The salt crystals both repel the pigment and absorb excess water, resulting in strange and varied starbursts that often reveal the underlying gestural marks of Hendrickson’s initial brush.

As the paint dries, forms shift and fractal patterns emerge. Though the process is purposefully repeated, the results vary in myriad, surprising ways.

This may seem counterintuitive. We tend to despise limitations, especially those in our own bodies. But in his incarnation, the Creator accepts the good boundaries he placed upon his creation. Theologian Kelly Kapic writes that “God is not embarrassed by the limitations of our bodies … but fully approves of them in and through the Son’s incarnation.” I struggle to accept this truth. But when I stand in front of a long gallery wall, covered edge to edge with dozens of Hendrickson’s Droplet paintings, each one different from the others, I marvel at how the God who enters into our humanity continues to multiply unimagined possibilities within its bounds.

A second mystery Hendrickson embraces is the entanglement of the material and the spiritual. Hendrickson began making these process-based paintings while she was in seminary. During that time, one of her friends was about to undergo a serious medical procedure. Anxious and scattered, Hendrickson struggled to pray with words. She turned to paint and paper, ordering her breath and her brush marks as an “integrated prayer.”

Hendrickson calls her practice opera Divina, or “holy work.” The term she coined builds on the Benedictine order’s motto of Ora et labora—“pray and work”—by asserting that our work itself can be a prayer. The movement of her hands across the paper, the slow swirl of paint, the sprinkling of salt, and the quiet waiting are themselves, she writes, “an intentional initiation of a conversation with the Divine.” Invisible offerings of praise, lament, confession, and petition take on material form.

Third, Hendrickson teaches us to anticipate transformation. John tells us that the Incarnation is the light shining in the present darkness (John 1:5). Hendrickson’s time-lapse videos of her painting process begin with the deep blue-gray pigment bleeding across the white paper. But then, when the salt crystals land on the wet surface, the midnight expanse is split open by glimmering light. The darkness is shattered. We wait, and we watch.

More recently, Hendrickson has begun tearing her paintings. She folds the large sheet of paper into 16ths, then unfolds it again and carefully tears along the horizontal creases. She stops three-quarters of the way across the paper then moves to the next row and tears in the opposite direction. Finally, she folds the entire sheet in a meander fold, resulting in an accordion-like booklet. Hendrickson thus transforms her two-dimensional paintings into three-dimensional objects.

Prayer Book, Julia Hendrickson, watercolor and salt on paper, dimensions variable, 2024.

She does so while maintaining the paintings’ integrity. They are not torn into separate pieces, nor is anything added to them. They are still paintings, and they have now become—as Hendrickson names them—prayer books.

When I watched her do this for the first time, my heart stuttered. What a strange sight, to see an artist ripping a beloved work. But she did not destroy it; she remade it.

The paradoxes of Hendrickson’s work stretch my own theological imagination. The Incarnation is not God momentarily slipping into a human skin. Perhaps it is more—yet not completely—akin to the way that the salt and pigment and water all remain themselves yet are utterly and mutually transformed. Perhaps it is more—yet not completely—akin to a painting that has been broken and resurrected.

I cannot claim to understand the doctrine of the Incarnation more rationally or thoroughly after spending time with Hendrickson’s work. But these paintings do expand my capacity for awe. I can more joyfully yield to this mystery: “In Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness” (Col. 2:9–10).

We now return to the 15th-century Annunciation Triptych.

Using delicate brushes and luminous oil paint, the artists pack this small three-panel painting full of detail. Instead of locating the Annunciation scene against a sacred gold background, as many medieval mosaics do, the altarpiece artists depict Mary and Gabriel in a recognizable 15th-century Flemish home. We see an oval table in the center of the room and a long wooden bench against a large fireplace.

In the right-hand panel, we glimpse Joseph in his carpenter’s workshop, with a city visible through the window. The left-hand panel depicts a walled garden with a Flemish couple in contemporary dress kneeling just outside the door to Mary’s home. The sacred is brought into the mundane.

In addition to the homunculus—the miniature representation of an infant Christ flying through the room—the artists pepper the scene with symbols that would have been familiar to a 15th-century audience. The lilies in a vase on the table are not just decorative; they represent Mary’s purity. A wisp of smoke curls up from a recently extinguished candle. In other artworks from the period, a lit candle represents the presence of the invisible God. But in this painting, that symbol is no longer needed since God himself is now incarnate and physically present.

While the altarpiece ostensibly depicts a particular moment from Luke’s gospel, it actually shows us, as philosopher James K. A. Smith writes, how the Incarnation is “the collision of time and eternity in Christ.” For instance, the mousetraps in Joseph’s workshop point to the end of Jesus’ life on earth. The little wooden contraptions reference Augustine of Hippo’s declaration that “the Lord’s cross was the devil’s mousetrap.” The painters thus present us simultaneously with Christ’s conception and his death.

But the artists also stretch the intimacy of this pivotal moment into their own present. The couple in the left-hand panel are presumably the work’s owners. They are painted with startling particularity: The man has a small wart near the corner of his mouth, and we can see individual stitches on the woman’s wimple. They kneel reverently on Mary’s doorstep, bearing witness to a historical moment with eternal significance. The painting bends time around the Incarnation, folding these worshipers into a present mystery.

Finally, the Annunciation extends its invitation to our own time as well. When we first look at the room in the central panel, we might think that we’ve found a clumsy mistake. Despite the high level of detail, the space does not recede convincingly. The artists do not follow the principles of linear perspective, resulting in a strangely shallow room that appears to be tipping forward. But the effect, when we’re bending down in front of the altarpiece to get a closer look, is that the space begins to enfold us.

Thousands of years after Gabriel’s greeting to Mary and hundreds of years after a Flemish couple bought this devotional object, the painting spills into our present. Incarnation promises to meet us again and again.

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” These works of art, among others, can translate John’s text into knowledge that reshapes how we engage our present reality.

Both contemporary process-based abstractions and detailed early-modern altarpieces evoke the mystery of the Incarnation; their own strange paradoxes of material and meaning keep us from complacency.

Art helps me be more tender toward all I can’t see in the dark, to believe—even if I can’t comprehend—that the infinite could become an infant and settle here, with me. Art renews my wonder at the wildness of this reality: Christ has come, and Christ will come again.

Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt is associate professor of art and art history at Covenant College and the author of Redeeming Vision: A Christian Guide to Looking at and Learning from Art.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Made in Human Likeness".

- More from Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt

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Winter Benediction

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