Make Christianity Spooky Again

Rod Dreher’s new book is a sprawling, vulnerable call to enchantment in a disenchanted world.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

Rod Dreher has some advice for you. First, put down your phone, close your laptop, and turn off the television. Next, begin to pray. Don’t pray just anything; recite the Jesus Prayer, preferably hundreds of times. Now you are positioned to begin your quest. The object of the quest is beauty. Seek to behold divine glory in the work of the Lord’s hands, whether in his creation, icons, or saints. If you have eyes to see, each of these is a mirror reflecting the light of Christ in a dark but not forsaken world.

In a word, you must become a “practical mystic.” If you don’t, you’ll lack the resilience to weather a godless, disenchanted culture. You and your children will lose hold of the faith. Like the apostle Peter, you will sink beneath the waters; unlike him, no one will lift you up. Or so argues Dreher in his new book, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age.

Dreher is an Eastern Orthodox journalist and blogger from Louisiana who has published five previous books and now writes a Substack with more than 20,000 subscribers. For 20 years he has commanded a sizable, committed, and diverse readership. Many factors explain his success, but four stand out and deserve attention before we turn to Living in Wonder.

The first is his restlessness, which is both tangible and infectious. Dreher is a lifelong seeker. He’s a pilgrim in search of the truth, and he won’t sleep until he finds it.

The second is his existential urgency. Utterly unfeigned, this energy corrals readers into a kind of compulsive vicarious participation in the trials and burdens, victories and defeats of Dreher’s many adventures.

The third is his transparency. Dreher’s writing is never detached; it is always autobiographical. Far from presenting a happy or successful façade, Dreher is vulnerable to a fault, consistently self-critical, and never the hero of the tale. At best, he is the mouthpiece of an experience or perspective, whether his own or another’s.

The last is his relevance. Dreher has always had his finger on the pulse of the culture. He has coined phrases now in common currency (“the Benedict Option” and “the law of merited impossibility,” for example); he has crowned politicians (a 2016 interview boosted JD Vance’s name recognition; political strategist James Carville touted his influence in Politico); and he has forged connections with a variety of public figures loosely bound by concern over the state of Western culture (Ross Douthat, Jordan B. Peterson, Jonathan Pageau, Paul Kingsnorth, and more). Even Dreher’s unhappy, on-again, off-again relationship with conservative politics is a symptom of the times.

If Dreher is indeed a prophet of the Zeitgeist—whether heralding its advance or proclaiming its doom—then a new book from him is worth pausing to consider. And this one happens to be about angels, demons, exorcists, aliens, UFOs, visions, dreams, miracles, witchcraft, and the internet.

A disenchanted age

There are three major elements to Living in Wonder: a metanarrative of decline; an overarching diagnosis, prognosis, and prescription; and a set of practices for the individual reader. I began above with the third, so now I will focus on the first two.

Dreher argues that the contemporary West is disenchanted. This term can mean many things, but Dreher defines it as “the evaporation of a sense of the supernatural within the world, and its replacement with a belief, sometimes unacknowledged, that this world is all there is.” A disenchanted society is materialistic, rationalistic, individualistic, and hedonistic. It is unspooky. It is not open to the transcendent, the divine, the mysterious, the inexplicable. It is closed off by design.

How did we get here? By a lengthy series of social, cultural, economic, scientific, and intellectual transitions, beginning in the late Middle Ages. We lost a sense of “the givenness of things,” to use Marilynne Robinson’s phrase. We began to think things are what we make of them rather than gifts from God to be cherished and stewarded. We strapped nature to a chair and tortured her for secrets. Alluding to Yuval Noah Harari, Dreher writes that “the story of modernity is of humankind exchanging meaning for power.”

We got power, all right. But was the exchange worth it? Dreher suggests not. In fact, he says, the tradeoffs are so drastic that, while we can’t go back, we can’t stay where we are, either.

Are things really so bad, though? Dreher grants all the objections: the lives of countless people improved by medical science, lifted out of poverty by markets, and ennobled by the franchise. Nevertheless, his reply is that of Jesus: “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” (Matt. 16:26). The sum of all our progress amounts to nil if we lose God, and thus our own souls, in the bargain.

Dreher wants us to look around. The aura of autonomy and freedom has blinded us to our fetters. Self-creation is not liberation but bondage. Who, we might ask, is the self whose authenticity I am meant to serve? Who is the inner me whose birth I am supposed to midwife? By what measure or power am I to fashion myself—and in the image of what, except myself?

Stanley Hauerwas writes that “modernity names the time when people came to believe they should have no story determining their lives except the story they chose when they had no story.” The internet only supercharges this belief, Dreher says as he dubs it “a vast disenchantment machine.”

Online and off, this life of disenchanted self-creation hasn’t brought us the general satisfaction we expected. It has brought anomie, acedia, torpor, decadence, loneliness, anxiety, depression, pornography, addiction, deaths of despair, and declining rates of marriage, childbirth, and church attendance. Instead of doubling down on our errors, better to double back and see where things went wrong.

Rediscovering enchantment

Such is Dreher’s diagnosis and, short of drastic change, prognosis: “Living in disenchantment is killing us and destroying our civilization. … Either we will stop it or it will stop us.”

How to stop it? Dreher’s answer is re-enchantment:

Christian re-enchantment is not about imposing fanciful nostalgia onto the world, like coating a plain yellow cake with pastel fondant frosting. Instead, it is about learning how to perceive what already exists and reestablishing participatory contact with the really real. God has already enchanted the world; it is up to us to clear away the scales from our eyes, recognize what is there, and establish a relationship with it.

Here and throughout the book, Dreher draws on theologian Hans Boersma and others to articulate a “sacramental ontology.” As psychologist and blogger Richard Beck puts it in his 2021 book Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age, “‘Sacramental ontology’ is about how everything around us, everything that exists, points us toward God. All the world is a sign.”

This can be acted upon in one of two ways. The first is to deploy it as a lens to observe everyday life. God is no longer distant but can be found anywhere and everywhere, whether at Walmart or the auto shop, the voting booth or a neighbor’s backyard. Re-enchantment becomes a devotional or epistemic program for the individual believer, a matter of curating one’s routines to be mindful of the omnipresent Lord. Beck’s approach leans this way.

The second is to bite the bullet and proclaim, fingers uncrossed, that God works signs and wonders in the world today, just as he did in the times and stories of Holy Scripture. In this view, angels intervene in mortal affairs; demons assault and possess unsuspecting sinners; terminal illnesses are healed by divine miracle; young men see visions; and old men dream dreams (Acts 2:17). None of these things ever ceased. Christians in the West merely lost the desire or ability to see them.

Dreher wants to marry both approaches to a sacramental view of the world. Signs and wonders are occasional but not exceptional, he believes. They distill the essence of reality so that, having once beheld or believed in the extraordinary, our eyes might be open to it in the daily grind—we will, as the book’s title promises, live in wonder.

For this reason, the book is filled with story after story of the numinous and remarkable. The stories are not only others’ experiences but also Dreher’s own. He is neither defensive nor apologetic. His guard is all the way down. As he writes at one point, “I’m too old to care what people think.”

Hence the chapter on UFOs. Diana Pasulka uses the phrase “epistemological shock” to describe what happens to anyone who moves from skepticism to openness regarding aliens and other paranormal phenomena. But Dreher’s life as a Christian has been one long shock to what he thought he knew, and this book is where he lets it all hang out.

He’s in good company. With Jacques Vallée, Jeffrey Kripal, and Carlos Eire, Pasulka is part of a vanguard of thinkers unwilling to follow modernity in preemptively writing off the atypical, the paranormal, and the mystical. Andrew Davison, an Anglican priest and systematic theologian, last year published a book called Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine: Exploring the Implications of Life in the Universe. The careful, subtle arguments of Davison’s impressive scholarship might be boiled down to say, “Christians should be in the alien business.”

Dreher is already there. His position is simple: Whatever the nature of the encounters to which so many people across so many cultures and continents bear witness, these stories are one more reason to resist disenchantment. Reality is not what the secular West supposes. The official story is false. Christians of all people should be the first to realize it. In fact, they should be leading the charge against it.

Let me put my cards on the table: I think Dreher and his allies are right on enchantment generally. I don’t have any difficulty believing the miraculous testimonies he shares, nor do I see why any Christian should. As Blaise Pascal wrote long ago, “How I hate such foolishness as not believing in the Eucharist, etc. If the gospel is true, if Jesus Christ is God, where is the difficulty?” That doesn’t mean everything Dreher reports actually happened, only that it’s possible.

But the one place I think Dreher begins to lose his moorings is in his discussion of aliens, the government, and Silicon Valley. By all means, these topics belong in the book. But Dreher is too confident in his assertions, too deferential to insiders, too quick to offer detailed hypotheses about what “they” are up to and why. On aliens—unlike angels—the apostle Thomas should be our model. Here, it is a virtue to doubt first and then verify.

Light from the East

The danger for every grand story of decline is that it overwhelms the reader. There’s not much to do at the end of the world except watch it go down. Thankfully, Dreher avoids fatalism and despair. We find ourselves, at most, “at the end of a world”—not the world, much less the only world.

If some of Dreher’s earlier work could be read as conflating the church with Western culture so that the future of one determines the future of the other, not so here. In a surprising twist, Living in Wonder turns out to be the book I always imagined when I first learned about The Benedict Option. Sex and politics are mostly missing in action. Dreher isn’t trying to intervene in worldly affairs; he’s trying to throw a lifeline to the lost, lonely, and adrift. The ethos of the book is not so much apolitical as post-political.

What matters instead, he argues, is attending to the world God has made, sacrificing our wills on the altar of Christ, and submitting to the power of the Spirit in the age of the Machine. If we do this, God is faithful and will keep us. Our seeming spiritual impotence, inherited from modernity, will not condemn us to alienation. The life of God is more powerful than that.

Moreover, the life of God is the whole ballgame. Moral rules, political order, social justice—these are goods the church nurtures and pursues. But they are not the end of the Christian life. God alone is our end, the final end of all creation. As Dante writes, “There is a light above, which visible / Makes the Creator unto every creature, / Who only in beholding Him has peace.”

But to see God requires repentance. In Dreher’s words, “If we want to live, we have to turn our lives around and walk away from the false parts of the Enlightenment and toward the true Light.” Such a total revolution is not primarily intellectual but affective and bodily: “We cannot think our way back to enchantment or unity with God. We can find it only by participating in his life,” that is, “by using our entire selves” in worship.

We must be wary of cheap substitutes, though. Dreher warns that churches “forever seeking the Next Big Thing to keep people entertained and in the pews” will not last in the long run. Sure, it’s “fun and exciting for a while, but it’s hard for church-as-spectacle to keep the show endlessly exciting. It comes to seem shallow and gimmicky, because, well, it is.”

At the same time, the solution isn’t “powerful exegesis of papal encyclicals, erudite sermons about the mechanics of salvation, five killer apologetic arguments to use against atheists, or any other canned strategy.” Rationalism is no alternative to emotionalism. Each is a misreading of what people in the West—especially young people—are seeking.

“They want to know whether life has any meaning or this is all there is,” Dreher recognizes. “They don’t want to know about God; they want to know God.”

At times, Living in Wonder reads like a tract for Eastern Orthodoxy. A convert himself, Dreher is likely to lead others eastward. So be it: I’m not converting, but neither will I gainsay him. The best books are not dispassionate treatments of neutral subject matter; they reach out from the page and seize the reader by the lapels. That’s what Dreher has done. He wants your soul for Christ.

Maybe you should consider giving his advice a try. Get offline. Go to the woods. Bring a Bible, a candle, maybe an icon. Say the Jesus Prayer without ceasing. Ask for a sign. Ask for the Lord. Ask for power. Then wait—and see what happens next.

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.

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Theology

Does Jesus Tell Us to Prioritize Caring for Our Own?

Carmen Joy Imes

The story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman is provocative, but for different reasons than we might think.

Christ and the Canaanite Woman painted by Annibale Carracci in the 1590s

WikiMedia Commons

It’s election season, so naturally immigration is among the hot-topic issues taking center stage in public discourse—from discussions about the border crisis to comments about Haitian immigrants in Ohio. But it has also become a subject of conversation among Christians on both sides of the aisle, especially as recent studies show that more evangelicals see immigrants as a threat and an economic drain.

As a Bible scholar, one thing that gets my attention is how believers interpret (or misinterpret) Scripture to support their political views. And lately, I’ve noticed several posts on social media arguing that Jesus himself encourages his followers to focus on caring for “their own” (i.e., fellow Christians) instead of marginalized groups like the poor and immigrants.

One particular claim references the passage where Jesus tells a Canaanite woman, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs” (Matt. 15:26), alleging that Jesus is prioritizing the “house of Israel” (v. 24) over foreign nations. This becomes the basis for the claim that US federal resources should be spent on helping “our own” at the expense of immigrants.

But is this a faithful way to understand Jesus’ words? Was Jesus as ethnocentric as these arguments makes him sound? The short answer is no, of course not. But to better understand this verse in its context, we’ll explore the background of the Matthew passage and consider the longer version of this story from another Gospel (Mark 7).

To state the obvious, Jesus was a Middle Eastern Jew. His people had suffered for centuries under oppressive Greek and Roman rule. His mission was to help the Jews recognize the reign of God despite their less-than-ideal political situation.

Growing up in Galilee put Jesus on the margins of Jewish life. Far from Jerusalem, his family had to travel quite a distance for religious festivals. He lived at the confluence of Jewish, Greek, Samaritan, and Roman cultures along with their languages: Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Latin.

During his earthly ministry, Jesus focused primarily on his own people—the Jews. Yet his prioritization of the Jews served a wider purpose. The Jews were the descendants of Abraham, through whom God intended to bless the whole world. God had promised Abraham, “All peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Gen. 12:1–3). And in many ways, Jesus prepared his followers to bring that blessing to non-Jews.

But if we see this plan for vicarious blessing as the Jewish “elite” offering handouts to their non-Jewish marginalized neighbors, we have it backward. The Jews were the oppressed minority in this equation. In fact, for the Jews to eventually reach non-Jewish people with the gospel, the Jews would have to forgive their oppressors, who made it difficult for them to make ends meet.

On one occasion, Jesus traveled with his disciples outside Israel into bordering Gentile regions, offering a rare glimpse of his posture toward outsiders to the Jewish faith. It’s no accident that Mark writes about this trip right after relaying a discussion with Jewish leaders about defilement (7:1–23). Jesus had just insisted, “Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them” (v. 15).

Back then, food was often an obvious delineator between ethnic groups. Jewish food laws that designated between clean and unclean foods (including pork, shrimp, and other meat with blood) led Jewish people to consider anyone who ate “unclean” foods to be “unclean.” By insisting that eating could not defile a person, Jesus undermined the assumption that Gentiles were unclean and effectively tore down the cultural barrier between Jew and Gentile.

Then, as if to prove his point, Jesus brought his disciples straight into Gentile territory, where he would undoubtedly encounter people who ate nonkosher food. He started in “the vicinity of Tyre” (v. 24), then headed “through Sidon” and “into the region of the Decapolis” (v. 31). Now, Jesus wasn’t ordering bacon cheeseburgers for his disciples at this point—the kosher laws hadn’t expired yet—but he clearly wanted them to start rethinking their relationship with food because it had implications for their relationship with Gentiles.

Tyre was the capital of Phoenicia, a coastal region devoted to the worship of Baal, Melqart, and other gods. While Jesus was there, a second-generation immigrant approached him. The woman was Greek by ethnicity but “born in Syrian Phoenicia” (v. 26). Word had spread even outside Israel about the miracle worker from Galilee (3:7–8). This woman in Tyre “came and fell at his feet. … She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter” (7:25–26). Mark calls the demon “an impure spirit,” connecting this incident to Jesus’ previous teaching on impurity (v. 25).

But what happened next is jarring. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, was awfully harsh with her: “‘First let the children eat all they want,’ he told her, ‘for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs’” (v. 27).

As readers, we rightly cringe at this interaction because Jesus seems to insult the woman, comparing her to a dog. In New Testament times, Jews commonly used the dog epithet for Gentiles, who were stigmatized because they did not follow Jewish law and were thus “impure.” This is why we must not lose sight of the literary context. Jesus had just challenged the notion of Jewish purity, which was at the heart of their ethnocentrism and which set up firm boundaries around sacred space to protect “us”from “them.” Jesus seemed intent on demonstrating to his disciples that he was not afraid to go outside the land of Israel or to engage with Gentiles.

WikiMedia Commons

Christ and the Canaanite Woman painted by Annibale Carracci in the 1590s

However, traveling to Gentile territory did not mean Jesus was attempting to launch a Gentile-focused ministry—it wasn’t time yet. Later, he would commission his disciples to take the news far and wide, but first, he needed to lay the groundwork by helping his own people rethink who’s in and who’s out. After all, we cannot effectively reach those we despise or consider unclean.

Jesus’ seemingly callous response to the woman served a dual purpose: He was voicing what his disciples surely believed. Matthew 15:23 reports the disciples’ dismissive attitude: “Send her away!” At the same time, he was presenting the woman with an opportunity to test her faith.

Would she recognize his identity and press past the apparent insult that an ethnocentric and prejudiced Jew would have delivered? Would she agree with him that her access to God’s blessing would need to come through the Jews, who were themselves a marginalized people? In essence, Jesus engaged in a form of street theater to drive his point home.

Yet the Syrophoenician woman spotted the loophole right away, perceiving his invitation to persist—as Jesus likely knew she would. After all, Jesus used the word first to imply there would come a day when Gentiles could directly benefit from his ministry. So why not now?

“‘Lord,’ she replied, ‘even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs’” (Mark 7:28).

This woman passed Jesus’ test with flying colors! She cleverly exploited his parable to reiterate her request. She discerned what his disciples could not at the time—that Gentiles had a place even now in Jesus’ kingdom.

In his version of the story, Matthew calls the woman a “Canaanite” to highlight how Jesus’ interaction with her resurrects the age-old prejudicial animosity between the Israelites and the Canaanites before putting it to death (Matt. 15:22). For attentive readers, this is not the first mention of a Canaanite woman. Two others appear in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus—Tamar and Rahab—an early hint about how we should regard this living Canaanite woman (1:3, 5).

Of course, the disciples didn’t have Matthew’s or Mark’s Gospels yet. They were watching Jesus’ actions and words unfold in real time. But I’m willing to bet Matthew’s experience with Jesus in Tyre influenced his decision to mention Canaanite women in his genealogy—he wants us to know in no uncertain terms that these women belong in the story of Jesus.

We must keep in mind that this tour of Gentile territory was meant as a teaching illustration for Jesus’ disciples, who failed to understand his teaching on impurity (Mark 7:17–18). He took them on a field trip to trace out the implications of what he had said and to expose the ill-informed thinking in his disciples that must change.

In his book Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, Kenneth Bailey summarizes the point of this story powerfully:

Jesus is irritated by the disciples’ attitudes regarding women and Gentiles. The woman’s love for her daughter and her confidence in him impress Jesus. He decides to use the occasion to help her and challenge the deeply rooted prejudices in the hearts of his disciples. In the process he gives the woman a chance to expose the depth of her courage and faith.

A refugee and Galilean, Jesus modeled for his disciples how to think about other outsiders moving forward. By engaging this Greek immigrant in conversation, he offered her something no Jewish rabbi would have: the dignity of debate. Rabbis loved to debate the finer points of theology, but Jewish men did not interact at this level with women, least of all foreign women.

By making a provocative statement, he invited her to speak rather than silencing her. And what may have seemed like an insult was in fact a respectful offer to engage in meaningful conversation. Together, they negotiated a solution that honored Jesus’ calling to the house of Israel while meeting her request. Having made his point to the disciples, Jesus healed the woman’s daughter, setting her free from the demon (7:29–30).

In short, it doesn’t work to generalize Jesus’ statement about his calling to the house of Israel as a charge to “care for our own.” To do so is to miss his irony and ignore the rest of the story. Likewise, if we use this story to advocate for open borders, we have misunderstood the story of the Canaanite woman in the other direction.

In any case, the United States is not the kingdom of God. So, whatever our policies, we should be careful not to co-opt biblical stories uncritically to support our political agendas.

But if there’s one thing we can learn from this seemingly confusing passage, it’s that Jesus’ kingdom is one in which all who trust in him are ultimately seated together at the same table to share bread. Everyone who places their faith in him is welcomed as equal—for “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).

Carmen Joy Imes is associate professor of Old Testament at Biola University and author of Bearing God’s Name, Being God’s Image, and the forthcoming Becoming God’s Family (IVP).

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Ideas

What Campaign Signs Taught Me About Being a Good Neighbor

Karen Swallow Prior

Community relationships make politics less abstract and more complex.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

Years ago, my father taught me something about neighborliness that took a long time to take root in my own life.

When I was a teenager, the father of one of my classmates (who lived nearby) was running for local office on the ticket of the party my family never voted for. So I was surprised one day to come home and see a campaign sign for my friend’s father in our yard. But it turned out that my friend’s father simply had asked my father if he could place one of his signs in our yard, and my father had said yes. Being a hospitable neighbor was more important to my father than partisan politics or a campaign sign.

Now, all these years later, this particular lesson in neighborliness is something I’ve come to apply in my own life in a slightly different way.

Often, when we talk about loving our neighbors, we are thinking in the abstract. Perhaps we are thinking about loving neighbors on a global scale—those who live far from us, whom we encounter on short-term mission trips and exotic vacations, or fill shoe boxes for at Christmas time, or learn about on missions Sunday when we put money into a special offering. And loving our neighbors can be all these things. But just as “all politics is local,” so, in a sense, is all neighborliness local, too.

I inherited my father’s keen interest in politics. Over the course of my life, I have attended campaign rallies, canvassed door-to-door for a candidate, slapped bumper stickers on my car, worn buttons, and even run for office myself. And as soon as I became a homeowner, I also put up campaign signs on my property.

When my husband and I moved to our current home 25 years ago, each fall still found me putting up those signs on our front lawn. It took me a long time to notice that our immediate neighbors did not.

Almost all of our half dozen or more immediate neighbors were already living here when we moved in. They are all still here. That’s a lot of history, a lot of tradition, a lot of heritage.

And our neighborhood is anything but homogenous. Our house is the oldest in the neighborhood. Other houses of various sizes and styles have popped up here and there over the past century, some built decades ago, others still being built. Our neighborhood has large new homes, small doublewides, and lots of modest brick ranches. Like their homes, the people who live in them represent just about every demographic box one might be asked to check. Indeed, the diversity of our little rural corner of the country could rival the hippest of urban neighborhoods.

Back then, politics seemed black and white to me—I really believed one party was all about law and order and morality, and the other one was not. Then, I didn’t think twice about putting my campaign sign in the yard with its face peering over at my neighbors, whose very lives—as I would slowly learn over the years—had been harmed and hurt in measurable and lasting ways by some of that party’s policies.

But I would eventually learn these things as our neighbors let us into their lives more and more and we let them into ours. We didn’t have much in common with any of our neighbors at first, other than living in the same neighborhood. We all had our own schedules and were in different stages of life.

But over the years, chats at the mailbox led to invitations to family celebrations and shared holiday meals. After I admired one neighbor’s climbing vine on her mailbox, she planted a similar one next to ours. Another neighbor loved my lilies, so I invited her to come over and dig some up for her yard. When one neighbor grew sick, the rest of us checked in with his spouse. When another neighbor died, my husband took over mowing the lawn of his widow. When another neighbor died, someone else in the neighborhood took over their mowing. When we lose an old tree, we call another neighbor, who cuts up the wood to burn in his family’s woodstove.

Over the years, through all these exchanges of neighborliness, I gradually learned more about my neighbors’ histories and their ancestors’ histories. I learned the history of our neighborhood—how some people faced injustice and evil, and how others overcame evil with good.

I wondered if any of those campaign signs felt like a slap in the face to my neighbors. If so, they never let on.

Let me be clear: I am not making any argument here about putting up or not putting up campaign signs. Travel to either end of our long country road, and you will find some. (Here in my neck of the woods, only one party tends to be represented. And that’s okay, too.) There is nothing wrong or inherently unneighborly in advertising one’s favored candidates for office.

Rather, my reflections are about how I learned over a long time to be a better neighbor in my own particular neighborhood, among a handful of particular families with whom I have (or had) little in common besides sharing this space, seeing each other day by day as we collect mail, wash cars, weed the flower beds, feel alarm at the occasional sight of an ambulance in the drive, or share reports of the latest bear sighting or stray dog.

Every neighborhood has a different character. Every neighbor has a different story and set of experiences. When I finally learned more of those things about my community, and observed more about how they live and have lived, I wanted to be a better neighbor to them in this small way of not creating a barrier with a sign.

And hopefully I am a better neighbor in much bigger ways, too—as they are to me.

A campaign sign can signify so much and yet so little in comparison to the ordinary exchanges and camaraderie between neighbors. It took me a long time, but I came to realize that I don’t want a printed piece of polypropylene to come between me and these people I’ve grown to know better and love more just in being neighbors. I’m grateful my father taught me that lesson so long ago.

Karen Swallow Prior, author of The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis, is a columnist at Religion News Service and writes regularly on Substack at The Priory.

Learn more about Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy.

Ideas

Time Is Not a Political Promise

Myles Werntz

Candidates say they’ll revive a gloried past or birth a better future. But Christians especially should know that isn’t how time works.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

American voters are divided over many issues this election cycle, but we’re united in a deeper expectation for our political parties: They promise—and we want them to promise—the control of time itself.

This promise takes different forms for different politics. Some candidates pledge to bring a better future. Others say they’ll return us to a better past. The direction of the promise matters less than the fact of it. Once we have decided that time can be thus managed, it’s just a matter of picking which time we prefer.

The two leading contenders this year have particularly obvious, dueling notions of time. The Harris campaign’s catchphrase, “We’re Not Going Back,” rejects the past, while the Trump campaign’s promise to “Make America Great Again” lurches in reverse. Despite their policy divides, both campaigns trade on dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and both look to some other time as the solution.

As a political strategy, it’s effective. Discontent with the present, Americans ask when, if ever, life was better than this—and both candidates have a ready answer. Former president Donald Trump’s reply is a particular rendering of the past, one that omits historical wrongs and insists old greatness can be recaptured. Vice president Kamala Harris peers into the mists of the future. She may not be able to offer certainty about what the future holds, but whatever its challenges, she assures, it’ll be better than what’s behind us.

This sense that the best kind of politics comes from some time other than now has become so common in American elections that we scarcely notice it. In 2012, it was in Barack Obama’s “Forward” and the Mitt Romney–linked “Restore Our Future” (the latter of which manages to look in both directions at once). The parties’ chronological orientations were reversed in 2004, with John Kerry’s “Let America Be America Again” and George W. Bush’s “A Safer World and a More Hopeful America.” Whether we visit the 1996 election, with Bill Clinton’s “Building a Bridge to the 21st Century,” or “We Are Turning the Corner” in Herbert Hoover’s ill-fated 1932 campaign, time—and how we conceive of it—is always on the ballot.

Across these varied campaigns, we should notice two common commitments. First is the assumption that the present is worse than some other time. Whether that time is decades beyond anyone’s remembering or in a future yet to be named, that time is not now. Imagine a candidate saying, You know what? This is pretty good. Let’s not change anything and just stay here. You can go ahead and declare that candidacy dead.

Second, these promises assume time moves in a straightforward manner. Life is either getting better or worse. We are in either a climb of progress or a slick decline. Republicans and Democrats alike presume that time can be reliably managed. What worked once will work again, or what is working now will only keep working better in the days to come. If we simply pick the best time and work to reach or return to it, we’ll have the lives we want.

But in the sober days of nonelection years, I think we really do know better. We know that time does not work this way. Time is full of ambiguity and reversals. It never lives up to its promises. Sometimes, a new thing appears, something no one saw coming.

For readers of Scripture, it should be a truism that time is not straightforward, that what is past cannot be repeated, that the future is out of our hands. That recognition is basic to what it means to be the people of God. This does not mean quietly suffering injustice. It does mean that, for Christians, living well within time requires getting comfortable with the fact that no time—past and future just as much as the unsatisfying present—will fulfill our hopes.

Consider a moment from Numbers 11 which encapsulates this dynamic. As the people of God traveled through the desert, they became discontented with their journey. They longed for the past—and the leeks and onions—in Egypt, forgetting that Egypt was also the place of their enslavement (v. 5).

The manna of the present lay amply before them, and God’s guidance was close at hand, but the people longed for quail. They wanted food that belonged not to the desert present but to the coastline they had not yet reached (v. 31). And God provided the quail, a food from the “future,” but it wasn’t a gift. It was a judgment on the people’s discontentment with the provisions of the present (vv. 31–34).

We can read this passage as a judgment against grumbling, but it strikes me that it’s better read as an exhortation to refuse wishful thinking about the past or future.

The past may well have had goodness—the food probably was better in Egypt!—but it also had suffering we’ve forgotten or been unwilling to acknowledge. Likewise, to “Make America Great Again” by somehow returning to the past would mean recovering the morals of a lost world and also its prejudices and injustices.

And the future may well have its glory—Israel was not wrong to look forward to leaving the desert!—but the future will also have its unfulfilled promises, its limits and fresh failures we have not yet anticipated. Hurrying to an unknown future may not bring the relief and liberation suggested in “We’re Not Going Back.”

Perhaps a Christian view of time should look less like yearning for leeks and onions or milk and honey, giving ourselves to whomever promises to transport us to the desired past or future. Perhaps it should look more like recognizing the goodness of the manna God continually gives.

In that spirit, let me offer three proverbs for resisting the false allure of political promises to control the direction of our times.

Time is filled with ambiguity. Christians believe God will accomplish a good end for the world. But that does not mean the future will unfold as we want or expect. For even when Christ came in “the fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4, ESV), the coming of the Lord occurred alongside the death of the innocents (Matt. 2:16–18) and the continued rule of Rome. When the words of deliverance came to Isaiah (14:28), it did not mean Assyria had disappeared. None of this means God is absent, only that no time will be all we’ve hoped until “the old order of things has passed away” (Rev. 21:4).

Time is an occasion to learn to trust God’s provision. Our best times offer signs that we can trust God to provide in full. The bread in the desert, given in time, anticipates the Bread of Life, given to sustain us eternally. Moments of justice appear in our politics, and the setting right of wrongs is to be celebrated. These are exceptions which will one day, in God’s kingdom, be the rule. Celebrate them for what they are, and do not despise them for being incomplete.

Time is full of surprise and reversal. When Israel was being led through the desert, water appeared from rocks, manna from the sky, and quail from far-off lands. Walls were overtaken by horns, and spies were rescued by women on rooftops. God provided for Israel’s common life out of nothing, defying predictions of demise.

But good times are interrupted, too. God is with us, but time is complex and, for us, unpredictable. Israel’s return from exile in Babylon was followed by conquest by a Greek empire, then another brief reprieve, then conquest by the Roman empire.

God is always working within time, and he is not surprised by its twists or even its hairpin turns. We often are. We can’t foresee when a terrorist attack, depression, or global conflict will set aside the best political aspirations. Historical trends are one thing, but history is another, and only a fool will say that time runs in one direction.

In this light, Christians in America (or anywhere politicians promise to deliver the past or future) should be patient in the face of time’s ambiguity. These proverbs invite us to be temperate in our celebrations, to avoid mistaking temporary goods for permanent ones, to celebrate blessings while planning for leaner times. They invite us to learn to trust in the God who provides for his people again and again—the God who is with us in all times, even now.

Myles Werntz is author of From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision for Christian Life Together. He writes at Christian Ethics in the Wild and teaches at Abilene Christian University.

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Books

Review

Devaluing Mothers and Children Devalues Us All

Kate Lucky

When a society expects economic “winning” from all its members, it loses sight of their inherent preciousness.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Wikimedia Commons

Last week, our household came down with hand-foot-and-mouth disease. Quarantined during an unseasonable heat wave, I sweated through a fever while dabbing ointment on the baby’s weeping blisters.

This was an apt time to begin historian and Christianity Today contributor Nadya Williams’s new book, Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity. “The devaluing of children,” she writes forcefully in the introduction, “is inextricably connected to the disdain our society conveys for the work of mothers.”

Doing that work—drawing oatmeal baths, dosing infant Tylenol—I felt gratitude for Williams’s insistence that my baby and I mattered, even flushed and enfeebled, needing so much and producing nothing. “Evaluating the worth of motherhood and children in economic terms,” Williams writes, “they are guaranteed to come up wanting.” But the doctrine of imago Dei means that we are valuable nevertheless. Sores and all.

By Williams’s estimation, our societal disregard for God’s image in mothers and children has a far-reaching impact. It means that we see pregnancy as a sickness to be prevented or solved by means of birth control or abortion. It means we reduce our children’s existence to an “assembly-line life,” obsessing over educational achievement and resisting the reality that “children, like all people, are unpredictable individuals and are not made for the convenience of their parents.” It means we force new moms back to work too early, pitting their careers against their children.

Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic begins by describing contemporary problems. But disdain for mothers and children, Williams demonstrates, was also characteristic of antiquity. Drawing on myths, literature, and histories from Greek and Roman writers, she describes a past in which women were sexually exploited, infants were left “exposed” on “village dung heaps,” and anyone who couldn’t achieve military victory on the battlefield was a second-class citizen by default.

It’s Christianity, she argues, that changed all of this—that gave us the human rights we take for granted, that blessed the meek and lowly instead of kowtowing to the powerful. “It is because of two millennia of Christian valuing of human life,” she states forcefully, that “we do not delight in the suffering of the weak.” Both the life of Christ and the writings of the church fathers demonstrate that “the church is responsible for caring for the bodies and souls of the neglected and the abandoned at all ages and life stages, because their lives are priceless.”

It’s a compelling argument, albeit a familiar one. What’s novel here are Williams’s through lines between the past and the present, some so bold they seem drawn in thick marker. Just as “the practice of exposure of infants” emphasized a “utilitarian commodification of infants and children as things,” she argues, so today “we see … the common practice of aborting children with Down syndrome.” Back then, the spoils were concubines and slaves. Now, they’re stock options. But in both systems, the people who matter are the ones out winning—not the baby with the viral infection, not the mother with sweet potato in her hair. Do we really, Williams asks, want to return to that brutal pre-Christian era?

Some of Williams’s assertions—that sending kids to school is a “severing of bonds” echoing the child’s separation from the mother’s womb, for instance—will be “agree to disagree” for many readers. (She acknowledges this.) Some of her evidence for cultural phenomena—the posters in her ob-gyn office, a new housewives show that she hasn’t watched—is thin, even if she understands the phenomena correctly.

But even readers who disagree with Williams’s strong stances on surrogacy, contraception, or working mothers will appreciate the connections she makes, which are compelling, creative, and challenging. And the basic point stands: People matter because they’re made in the image of God. When we forget that, a lot goes awry.

Gradually, Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic becomes less about mothers and children and more about that “body politic,” all those “neglected and … abandoned at all ages and life stages.” Here, Williams turns her attention to single women and widows, the sick and the lame, victims of war and euthanasia. Flitting from the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ healings and excerpts from the martyr Perpetua’s journal to the fiction of Wendell Berry and Augustine’s City on a Hill, she fleshes out the “doctrine of the imago Dei.” Part of its legacy, she argues, is a disposition to encourage “love for every human being, hurt or whole—man, woman, child—regardless of age, gender, social or marital status, wealth, ability or disability.”

Agreed, of course. But I wish Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic hadn’t ended up quite so broad, hadn’t veered from its initial focus on these two subsets of “the least of these.” By the end, those bold through lines have gone fuzzy around the edges, petering out in an encouragement to volunteer in the church nursery.

Perhaps the focus on mothers and children ended up feeling too narrow to sustain an entire volume. But I get the sense that Williams has more to say, if only because this subject—the value of moms and kids amid late capitalism and declining fertility rates—is so personal for her.

Williams shocked friends and colleagues by giving up a tenured professorship to homeschool her three children. She did so in conscious defiance of the prevailing view that an educated woman “could never be truly fulfilled or happy if her life sphere were restricted to the domestic life.” But it’s clear that motherhood, by dint of the book’s existence, can coexist with the life of the mind. Writing mothers need not think of themselves as “writers first” in order to write well; in fact, “their motherhood, writing, faith, and faithful service to those around them” are “interlaced in ways that cannot be easily disentangled.”

Once again: Agreed. This long aside doesn’t account for the mothers whose employment, by economic necessity or otherwise, takes them away from their homes into hospitals and restaurants and construction sites. But it does resonate with at-home desk workers like me, typing one room over from a napping baby. (He’s all better now.) Williams warns me that I write and parent in the face of social conditioning to “place [my] work—creative or merely corporate—ahead of [my] children.”

Sometimes, that conditioning matters not a whit. Sometimes, the baby asserts himself as an image-bearer. Sometimes, there’s no writing. That is, sometimes, hand-foot-and-mouth pays a visit. As Williams puts it in her analysis of Perpetua’s journal, “Motherhood is always a call to suffer, in ways big and small.” In that sense, mothers aren’t just people for the church to protect. They are people for the church to learn from.

Kate Lucky is senior editor of culture and engagement at Christianity Today.

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News

The Return of the Hymnal

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Evangelicals seeking permanence and rootedness are reclaiming the practice of singing out of books.

A hymnal is distributed to every seat in the sanctuary at a Baptist church in San Antonio.

AP Photo/Eric Gay

Before the service starts on Sunday morning at San Diego Reformed Church, the building fills with the sound of singing. Sean Kinnally, an associate pastor, leads a 45-minute Psalm-sing so the congregation can practice reading music together and using printed hymnals.

“We’re seeking to add more and more hymns—it’s a more robust form of worship,” Kinnally said. “There has been incalculable growth in the singing at our church.”

San Diego Reformed is in the process of shifting its worship toward hymnal-aided congregational singing. The congregation is part of what appears to be a growing number of churches working to recover the practice—never entirely lost, but not as popular as it used to be—of singing from books.

Hymnals offer perceived permanence and stability in a musical landscape that changes quickly and often. The decision to reintroduce congregations to hymnals is often an ideological one, especially for churches that made the transition away from them in recent decades.

But a notable number of churches are making that choice, choosing the printed page over lyrics projected onto a screen.

Dan Kreider, a composer, arranger, and music minister who designed the Sing! Hymnal, which Crossway is releasing in fall 2025, said hymnals aren’t going to replace projection or any of the tech tools that undergird contemporary worship music. But they offer something valuable and different.

“If you’re in a church that just goes with the most popular songs, where is your sense of permanence? Think of the kids growing up in your church. Where is their sense of permanence? What songs are they going to remember and sing as they age? The hymnal slows us down,” Kreider said.

Hymnals have often served to connect Christians to specific traditions. Lutherans form a liturgical link with Martin Luther, singing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” while Wesleyans recall the spirituality of the first Methodists with “Arise, My Soul, Arise.”

Many denominations still print and distribute hymnals to help congregations shape their worship according to doctrinal and traditional distinctives. Some denominations have recently renewed efforts to strengthen people’s sense of musical connection.

The Christian Reformed Church of North America has a vetting project, offering guidance on the suitability of the theology of songs that worship leaders might choose for a service. The Christian Missionary Alliance is seeking to create its own modern body of worship music that foregrounds its theological distinctives. And the Global Methodist Church, formed this year out of a split with the United Methodist Church, is seeking to renew its Wesleyan identity, in part through a slim blue collection of 202 Charles Wesley hymns, O for a Heart to Praise My God.

Over the past 40 years, hymnal production has become increasingly linked to the worship music industry. Integrity Music printed its first edition of The Celebration Hymnal in 1997, which included a blend of contemporary songs and traditional Protestant hymns. The Sing! Hymnal is a collaborative project between Crossway and Keith and Kristyn Getty, two standard-bearers of the “modern hymn movement.”

Many of the hymnals and sacred songbooks published by worship music companies also establish historical connections, giving Christians a sense of rootedness.

Jesse P. Karlsberg, a researcher at Emory University and the project director of the digital publishing project Sounding Spirit, which is financed by the National Endowment for the Humanities, said that the printing of sacred music has always been commercial, religious, and social. And, he points out, there have long been efforts to revive music of an idealized past through the compilation of hymnals and songbooks.

“There are lots of examples of hymnals and songbooks that are basically retrospective,” said Karlsberg, who studies sacred music printed between 1850 and 1925. “At times there seemed to be a belief that what was needed was the music of the past, even if that was an imagined past.”

New hymnals, including the Sing! Hymnal,the Scripture Hymnal, and The Gospel Story Hymnal, don’t connect people to a specific denomination or a particular Christian tradition. But they offer rootedness through the tactile, concrete nature of a bound and printed book.

Many of the people involved with new hymnals believe that the physicality—singing from an ink-and-paper book instead of the more popular projected lyrics—matters a lot. They say singing from a hymnal shapes Christian spirituality in a deep and lasting way.

When Randall Goodgame, the creator of the popular kids’ musical program “Slugs & Bugs,” began writing songs for what would become the recently released Scripture Hymnal, he saw the music change children’s relationship with Scripture. The music allowed God’s Word to take root.

“I listened to people talk about how these songs impacted their kids, and I started to imagine churches and worship leaders and their congregations engaging with Scripture,” Goodgame said. “Think of the conversations we could be having if we were all just soaked in Scripture.”

The Scripture Hymnal includes 106 original songs that are all word-for-word settings of text from the Bible, written by Goodgame and a team of collaborators that includes fellow Christian artists Ellie Holcomb, Andrew Osenga, and Taylor Leonhardt. The commitment to singing Scripture alone is usually found in Calvinist Reformed churches, but Goodgame’s project isn’t rooted in that tradition. He said it grew out of a desire to offer more of the Bible to worshippers.

“We want leaders to feel good about challenging their congregations to learn Scripture through song, so we tried to make it beautiful and singable,” Goodgame said. “What we’re talking about is revival. If people in the church learn a ton of new Scripture, it will produce revival in their own hearts and in the church.”

Dan Kreider, who also designed and arranged the choral versions of songs in the Scripture Hymnal, said that the proliferation of new hymnal projects is an encouraging sign that worshipers are not just accepting whatever is new and popular but thoughtfully considering the music they want to sing.

Kreider designed and printed his first hymnal, Sing the Wonders, in 2016, for his home church. A conversation with one of his graduate school professors inspired the project.

“My hymnology professor said that the best hymnal a church could have would be one that a church could make for itself,” said Kreider. “That stuck with me. He was speaking of hymns as an identity around which a group of people could coalesce.”

Since that first in-house hymnal, Kreider has gone on to found the company Hymnworks and has designed more than 40 hymnals. Most of them grew out of word-of-mouth connections with other musicians and leaders who were intrigued by the idea of a bespoke hymnal.

In Kreider’s view, the rise of projection as the primary mode of reading and singing lyrics may be driving renewed enthusiasm for access to words and music on paper.

“We’re trying to curate songs that are rich in content, with lyrics that deserve to be chewed on. But with projection, they flash on the screen for a moment, then they’re gone.”

Kreider pointed out that because of the rise in self-publishing and increased access to custom printing, it’s become easier and more affordable for churches to commission their own hymnals. For most churches, he added, it is still cheaper to purchase existing hymnals, but that price gap is getting narrower.

“These are high-value, long-term projects,” Kreider said. “This is a project churches should think of in terms of shaping their musical identity for the next 15 years.”

Reintroducing hymnals in churches where they have fallen out of use requires both a shift in musical culture and the teaching (or reteaching) of skills like note-reading and harmonization. Some leaders and congregations are embracing this challenge, seeking out or creating new tools and resources in the process.

Isaiah Holt developed Sing Your Part, an app that teaches users to sing in individual parts and read music. He said the project grew out of the realization that if congregations are going to use their hymnals, they would need some education.

“Pastors reach out to us looking for a lifeline,” said Holt. “There are so many of us who don’t read music, but still, a lot of Protestant churches are using hymnals every week.”

Sing Your Part, which launched in June 2024, contains the full repertoire for seven hymnals and a large collection of songs in the public domain. Holt said 100 churches are currently using the app weekly. “How Firm a Foundation” is currently the most popular song on the app.

Holt hopes the app will help “breathe new life” into print hymnals. In just a few months, it seems to have helped churches put roots down into older Christian traditions of worship.

“Many church leaders we talk to are trying to help their churches reclaim something,” said Holt. “They feel like they’ve lost the musical literacy their ancestors had.”

Interest in traditional liturgy seems to ebb and flow in the trend cycle among American evangelicals, as does the search for historically informed musical worship practices. The current surge in demand for hymnals may be another cycle, and new volumes like the Sing! Hymnal and the Scripture Hymnal are meeting a demand for musical resources that can be held in hands and stacked on shelves.

Perhaps the interest will wane again in a year or two. But the people promoting hymnals say they really want the permanence that hymnals seem to offer.

“My goal,” said Dan Kreider, the minister behind the Sing! Hymnal, “is that every Christian could have, along with their Bible, a hymnal. We can’t take projectors with us everywhere.”

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Culture

Forgiveness Is an Art

Sho Baraka

The new movie “Exhibiting Forgiveness” depicts the dysfunction of generational trauma—and the freedom that’s on offer.

Andra Day as Aisha and André Holland as Tarrell in Exhibiting Forgiveness.

Stories are an advertisement for the virtues we value. And today’s stories are dominated by narratives that glorify personal indignation and revenge: John Wick, The Bourne Identity, and practically any heist film.

Meanwhile, forgiveness often feels archaic. And many films that broach the subject can fail to capture the complexity of real-life absolution, which rarely comes with a cheap confession or an obvious transformation.

Titus Kaphar’s Exhibiting Forgiveness is a laudable exception in an era of justified anger. The protagonist, Tarrell, portrayed by André Holland, is a painter about to have his life interrupted by the return of his once abusive and drug-addicted father, La’Ron, played by John Earl Jelks. The soulful Andra Day plays Tarrell’s wife, Aisha, the psalmist who gives musical context to the family’s lament. (I endorse any excuse to have Andra Day sing, no matter how contrived.)

Tarrell is a celebrated painter. Much like his paintings, Exhibiting Forgiveness is intentional in its composition, designed to focus the viewer on what’s consequential. The mise en abyme of importance is that forgiveness, like art, requires sacrifice, audacity, and long-suffering.

Aside from being a reputable artist, Tarrell is a loving father to his son and a devoted husband to his wife. Despite these virtues, he cannot seem to outperform his past trauma. As Bessel van der Kolk states in The Body Keeps the Score, “We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body.”

Tarrell believes he can shake his anguish without seeking help. His distress not only lives in his body, causing panic attacks, but also provides the impetus for his profound work.

The dilemma of art is that we can make something valuable while failing to resolve the pain that inspired it. Tarrell is loved by his agent—but possibly exploited. He is loved by consumers—which is a kind of voyeurism. Only a few are concerned with the soul behind the product.

The film presents its major conflict when Tarrell’s father returns, sober and saved, from a 15-year absence, seeking reconciliation from the son he neglected. Despite encouragement from Tarrell’s mother, Joyce, played by Academy Award nominee Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Tarrell refuses to entertain the idea. Joyce shares a litany of Scripture to warn her son about the self-destruction of unforgiveness—but those seeds fall among thorns. Now, we discover the flaw in our protagonist. He is tormented by his own pride.

If you’re expecting sophisticated apologetics in this film, you will be disappointed. Kaphar has presented us with everyday people. Joyce is that one aunt who believes the truth of the Bible in her bones better than she can articulate it with her tongue. La’Ron is that uncle who has experienced the transforming power of the Spirit and now texts Scripture to you every day. They are just as obnoxious with their virtues as they were with their vices. But they both appear to understand the power of Matthew 18:21–35.

In this passage, Jesus presents to his disciples a parable of forgiveness that is layered with warnings. A servant forgiven of an enormous debt refuses to forgive a fellow servant’s small debt, leading to his own punishment and showing that we must forgive others as God forgives us. Once the master learns of the servant’s unforgiveness, he hands him over to jailers. This is a stark reminder that unforgiveness is itself a form of torment, a cycle that keeps us chained to bitterness.

The ironic tragedy in Exhibiting Forgiveness is that by withholding forgiveness from someone who once tormented him, Tarrell is tormenting himself. His false liberation is actually a prison. As Nelson Mandela wisely stated, “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.”

Tarrell chooses the torment of resentment rather than the liberation of forgiveness because he doesn’t want to appear weak. But Christian forgiveness isn’t weak. It’s not a simple act of “letting go” or ceasing to hold something against someone. True reconciliation isn’t merely the absence of accusations; it’s the restoration of relationships to a state that existed before the offense occurred. Tarrell’s father has acknowledged his offenses, has done the work of repair, and desires that restoration.

Forgiveness, like art, is never finished. It is a daily practice of revision, a constant reconstructing of our understanding of both ourselves and those who have hurt us.

And, like art, forgiveness requires skill. It’s something that must be cultivated—through prayer, through practice, and through patience. Forgiveness doesn’t yield instant results, but it does yield enduring peace.

I found myself both applauding Tarrell’s progress and feeling unsatisfied with where he ends up. Forgiveness is a radical act, one that goes beyond human instincts and societal norms—but Tarrell doesn’t get radical enough. Without spoiling the film, I’ll say that the humanist in me was indulged, but the Christian had more questions. One of those questions: “Who is true forgiveness for?”

In a text exchange about the movie, theologian and friend K. A. Ellis shared this with me about forgiveness:

I’m learning from persecuted Christians that forgiveness is not solely for the guilty or the offended; forgiveness also serves as a witness to a watching world. Imagine millions of faithful Christians throughout history who, at their lowest moments, have uttered the same words as Jesus when he was hung on the cross: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Even as they’re physically punished, they pray forgiveness for those who hate and hurt them. … Such a thing is unfathomable apart from Christ.

Joyce encourages her son to be such a faithful witness. But she’s expecting the fruit of forgiveness from a tree that can only produce from the soil it was given. Tarrell was cultivated in anger and sorrow, but the very religion he mocks could be the rich ground he needs to flourish. In a moment of sincerity, he implores his father to continue to pray for him despite his refusing to embrace the biblical admonishment of his parents. His posture is “Be patient with me,” as the servant pleads in Matthew 18.

Exhibiting Forgiveness is an honest primer for the priesthood of believers. Some in the Black community might see the film as primarily dealing with the dysfunction of Black trauma. It could very well be that.

However, it can also be a kind of confession that leads to greater joy, fuller amnesty. This is artwork that can normalize forgiveness. As men reconcile with the trauma of their past, children will inherit the tools of emotional health, wives will rejoice, and our communities will witness redeemed portraits that reflect the forgiving Father in heaven.

It’s easy to get trapped in the colors of revenge and pain. Only through forgiveness can the full palette of life open up to us.

Sho Baraka is editorial director of Big Tent for Christianity Today.

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Books

Excerpt

After Making Baseball History, Branch Rickey Faced a Spiritual Crisis

Paul Emory Putz

How the famed executive who signed Jackie Robinson found renewed hope in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Wikimedia Commons

On a summer night in 1956 at a camp center in the mountains near Estes Park, Colorado, Branch Rickey took the podium. His task: to deliver an address to the 250 young men gathered for the inaugural Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) summer conference.

Well into his 70s, the aging Major League Baseball executive felt swept up in the moment. “If this group here tonight were to find themselves dedicated to a common cause,” he exclaimed, they could transform the United States “before the next generation is over.”

Rickey’s speaking role on the first night of the conference reflected his importance to the fledging FCA. Their relationship had begun in August 1954, when an unheralded 29-year-old college basketball coach named Don McClanen met with the baseball executive, sharing his vision for an organization of athletes mobilized to instill Christian values in America’s youth. “If athletes can endorse shaving cream, razor blades, and cigarettes,” McClanen reasoned, “surely they can endorse the Lord.”

When Rickey responded enthusiastically, McClanen had the final piece needed to launch his movement. The organization that became the Fellowship of Christian Athletes was born.

The significance of Rickey’s support for the FCA can hardly be exaggerated. Rickey had an elite sports pedigree. He had played in the big leagues and then carved out a long career in the front office, building championship teams with the St. Louis Cardinals and the Brooklyn Dodgers. The latter, under his direction, famously broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson.

Rickey was also a lifelong Methodist who remained committed to his faith. “I want to live the ideals of Christ every day, in business and on the athletic field,” Rickey explained. As the most prominent symbol of Christian faith in America’s most popular team sport, he was the prototype for the blend of sports and faith that the FCA sought to promote.

But the FCA provided something Rickey desired, too. In fact, a spiritual crisis in Rickey’s life the year before he first encountered McClanen had primed him to be on the lookout for something precisely like the FCA.

When McLanen came knocking on his door, Rickey saw something other than a no-name young man with big ideas and a bare resume.

He saw an answer to prayer.

Branch Rickey’s faith does not fit easily into the categories of “modernist” or “fundamentalist,” “mainline” or “evangelical.” One the one hand, he was a traditionalist who sought to follow the old-time Methodist religion passed down from his parents. Even as he made his way into professional baseball, he maintained his commitment to Sabbath observance, staying away from the ballpark on Sunday.

But he also supported ecumenical Protestant efforts to move beyond dogma and to find common ground on shared social issues. He read William James, the liberal philosopher of religion who located its power in the realm of personal experience. The church, Rickey believed, needed to help people see Jesus as a “live, dynamic force, willing to be put to the practical field test.”

The through line for Rickey’s faith, in both its traditional and modern forms, was that it needed to reach the individual person. In this way, his religious views were deeply tied to his view of America. He believed the country’s genius lay in the pioneering spirit of “rugged individualism.” By the 1920s, this led him to a growing concern with the influence of communism and socialism; collectivist systems, he believed, undermined the individual initiative that was necessary for the country to thrive.

Rickey’s suspicion of communism was heightened in the early years of the Cold War and the hysteria of the Red Scare. The entire country seemed to be on guard against the supposed threat of communism. In the minds of many Americans, it was lurking everywhere from the movie screen to the classroom—and, some believed, in the church as well.

In 1953, Rickey expressed his concerns to a Methodist official, asking about “the apparent socialistic tendencies” of some Methodist ministers and “the obvious identification of some of our theological professors with Socialism.”

Throughout 1953, Rickey’s worries about communist sympathizers within Methodism festered. Then, in November, Rickey’s faith received a shock. During lunch with his pastor, Robert Howe, and a Methodist bishop named Lloyd Wicke, the conversation turned to the Bible. Bishop Wicke, in Rickey’s telling, declared that the writers of the four Gospels offered contradictory versions of Jesus; he then informed Rickey that no one really believed that Jesus was born of a virgin.

When Rickey returned home, he reflected on Wicke’s comments, growing more and more disturbed. Was the bishop right? Was he mistaken to form his life around teachings found in a book full of contradictions?

Unable to sleep, pacing near the fireplace, he thought about throwing his well-worn Bible into the flickering flames. Rickey finally decided to lay out his frustration in a letter to Howe.

How could bishop Wicke, Rickey wondered, lead his congregation in reciting the Apostles’ Creed? How could he shepherd a Christian denomination when he did not believe basic Christian doctrines the laity took for granted? Rickey thought of his mother and father. “Neither of them would have been able to understand Bishop Wicke,” Rickey wrote, “but they always felt, I am sure, that they understood what Jesus said and by practicing what he preached they continuously increased their happiness and their belief in Jesus as the Christ.”

Rickey contrasted the bishop’s view of Jesus as a “social prophet” with his own view of a Jesus who “ministered to individuals, and right now.” The Sermon on the Mount, Rickey explained, “really makes me wish to be a good man—a better man. All of Matthew makes me believe that He is interested in me personally.”

Having vented his frustrations, Rickey ended his letter by resigning his membership from First Methodist Church.

Despite Rickey’s frustration, he stopped short of placing the letter in the mail. Rickey’s Methodist commitments were too strong, and the letter remained filed away with the rest of his papers.

Even so, it highlighted Rickey’s inner turmoil and his religious perspective. It revealed his continued focus on the practical usefulness of religion in an individual’s life. Rickey contrasted the bishop’s view of Jesus as a “social prophet” with his own individualistic conception of religion, highlighting throughout the letter what he called the “empirical knowledge” that grounded his and his parents’ belief in Christianity. By practicing their faith, they found it to be useful; by finding it to be useful, they found it to be true.

At the same time, the letter revealed the limits of Rickey’s pragmatism. Rickey was not a stickler for theological specifics, but for him Christian faith could only have practical meaning for an individual if it was grounded in core Christian doctrines about the deity of Christ and the reliability of the Bible. Rickey could not wholeheartedly follow a bishop who seemed to reject those beliefs.

In Rickey’s mind, more than his own Methodist faith was at stake—the future of the country depended on the continuation of personal Christian commitment. Theology and politics were intertwined. Bishop Wicke’s liberal theology and intellectualism could undermine America’s spiritual foundation and lead to communism.

Rickey’s shaken faith made him eager to connect with Christians who shared his approach to religion. In a letter to a friend a few months later, Rickey recounted it all: the lunch with Bishop Wicke, the letter he wrote but never sent, the distrust he felt for denominational leaders. “If I were ‘testifying’ in an old-time Methodist class meeting,” he reported, “I would close my remarks surely,—‘pray for me, my Christian friends, pray for me,’—and I would really mean it.”

Don McClanen knew nothing about this in April 1954 when he announced his FCA idea with a letter sent out to 20 prominent Christian athletes and coaches across America, including Rickey. The goal, McClanen explained in the letter, was to “provide an opportunity” for athletes and coaches “to speak and witness for Christ and the wholesome principles of good character and clean living to the youth of our nation.”

McClanen followed his letter with a summer road trip where he could make his pitch in person. In August, just before returning to Oklahoma, he met with Rickey in Pittsburgh. What was supposed to be a short conversation stretched for hours, ending with Rickey’s enthusiastic endorsement and support.

McClanen had the key leader he needed to provide respectability and legitimacy to his upstart organization. Rickey had renewed hope for the future.

By gathering Christian athletes under one banner, the founding of the FCA marked the beginning of a new era and the launch of a movement—the rise of a religious sports subculture that would come to define and shape what it meant to be a “Christian athlete” in the decades to come.

That subculture, in turn, was deeply shaped by the twin desires that motivated Rickey: finding an authentic faith that could speak to the everyday experiences of athletes and coaches, and connecting that faith with the destiny and direction of the American nation.

Paul Emory Putz is director of Truett Seminary’s Faith & Sports Institute at Baylor University. This essay is adapted from his book, The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports (Oxford University Press).

- More from Paul Putz

News

How Mexican Christians Reacted to Indigenous Inauguration Blessing

Franco Iacomini

“Not everything in our culture is bad or satanic,” explained a Zapotec evangelical leader.

Claudia Sheinbaum (center) takes part in an indigenous ceremony as part of her inauguration as the new president of Mexico.

Cristopher Rogel Blanquet / Stringer / Getty

On October 1, Claudia Sheinbaum became Mexico’s first female president. Like her predecessors, she was sworn in at the Palacio Legislativo de San Lázaro and gave her inaugural address in front of the Congreso General.

But her inauguration day also included a ceremony offered by a group of indigenous and Afro-Mexican women after she proceeded to the Plaza de la Constitución. The women, who represented several of Mexico’s 68 indigenous groups or were descended from free and enslaved Africans, handed her the bastón de mando y servicio. After Sheinbaum received the baton, a gesture symbolizing that the indigenous community had recognized her authority, she participated in a cleansing ritual led by a Mazatec healer.

The ritual, according to the official program for the ceremony, was to prepare her to exercise her leadership wisely and with prosperity, resulting in blessings such as health for all and good harvests.“Claudia, may the sacred elements accompany you, may the holy water always purify your soul, may the air always be with you, may our dear Mother Earth always bless you,” pronounced the celebrant, as incense burned. “We invoke the nahuales, the deities, and other divine beings and spirits that inhabit this place. We ask for life, enlightenment, and wisdom for the constitutional president, Dr. Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo.”

During the ritual, Sheinbaum and the representatives of the indigenous groups raised their arms with open hands and faced in each cardinal direction, asking the “divine forces of nature” for energy, wisdom, forgiveness, reconciliation, peace, and good health.

Then, the group turned to the “center of the earth”—which, for the ancient Aztecs, was located in the Temple of Tenochtitlan, one block from the ceremony site.

“From the center of the earth, we ask for forgiveness from our earthly mother. Because we have not respected her, we have suffered these climate changes with her,” said the celebrant as the event concluded.

Not many Mexican Christian leaders have spoken out in disagreement with this blessing, despite its nod to indigenous mythology and nahuales or naguales, guardian spirits that have the ability to communicate with gods and humans and to change their appearance from humans to animals.

“I don’t even know if the president has faith in those rituals,” said Luis Chávez, the president of the Unión Nacional de Traductores Indígenas, an organization dedicated to translating the Bible into the 68 indigenous languages and their 364 variations spoken in present-day Mexico. “But we understand that our peoples have a cultural identity, and not everything in our culture is bad or satanic.”

As a Zapotec whose community is based in the present-day state of Oaxaca, Chávez saw parts of the ceremony that he and other indigenous Christians could affirm.

“Although they are sometimes far from the Christian principles in which we believe, these rituals demonstrate principles of valuing life, nature and respect for authorities, whom our people recognize and obey,” he said.

Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known more commonly as AMLO, first incorporated the bastón de mando y servicio, an acknowledgment of the 23 million people (19 percent of the Mexican population) who still live in indigenous communities, during his 2018 inauguration. In November 2020, he took part in another traditional rite during a Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) event honoring those who had died in the Covid-19 pandemic.

Similar practices have also been adopted in other countries; former Bolivian president Evo Morales’ 2006 and 2015 inaugurations included traditional ceremonies, as did Colombian president Gustavo Petro’s 2022 inauguration.

Among the critics of the inauguration ritual was Father Eduardo Hayén Cuarón, parish priest of the Ciudad Juárez Cathedral and director of the weekly newspaper Presencia. “Everything seems harmless: women are lifted up, and peace, harmony, and good vibes are offered,” he wrote on X. “But we must point out that these are witchcraft rituals and are, in fact, a form of implicit worship of the devil.”

The cleansing ritual was a “shamanic ceremony,” wrote Aarón Lara, the president of the Ibero-American Congress for Family and Life. “Of course, it violates the secular state, which a few hours earlier Sheinbaum promised to uphold and guarantee for all citizens.”

A secular state since 1857, Mexico has nevertheless been a deeply religious country, one where Spanish colonizers built cathedrals over the ruins of ancient Aztec temples and many locals developed a syncretistic faith that is now deeply embedded in local culture. Contact of these indigenous belief systems with Christianity (and even with pre-Christian European influences that accompanied the Spanish colonizers) resulted in exuberant celebrations, like those of Día de los Muertos.

In many ways, these ceremonies are less about undermining the state’s official secularism and more about honoring indigenous cultures, something that has become more prominent in Mexico in recent decades, says Alejandra Ortiz, co-coordinator of the Logos and Cosmos Initiative in Latin America for the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students.

On the other hand, some feel confused by the mixture of beliefs present in people’s daily lives. “I see [the ceremony and the reactions to it] as part of the extensive religious syncretism we have in Mexico,” said Sally Isáis, director of the missionary agency Misión Latinoamericana de México.

Isáis notes that although political parties don’t align with religion, they borrow its terms and images. For instance, Sheinbaum’s party, formerly called the Movimiento Regeneración Nacional, now goes by Morena. “The very name Morena alludes to the ‘Brown Virgin,’ the Virgin of Guadalupe,” said Isáis, referring to the patron saint of the Americas and a title used for the specific appearance of the Virgin Mary in Mexico.

The nickname La Virgen Morena or La Morenita arose after Mary allegedly appeared to Nahua peasant Juan Diego in 1531 and he described the woman who visited him as having a dark-skinned face (in Spanish, piel morena). The story of the virgin appearing to a native led to a mass conversion of indigenous people—9 to 10 million people reportedly became Catholic in 10 years—but also led many new converts to see Mary as related to the local deity Tonantzin, the Aztec mother goddess. That aspect of Catholicism melded with pre-Hispanic religious practices to both aid the church’s popularity and help traditional belief systems survive.

Despite Mexico’s robust religiosity, Sheinbaum has a relatively ambiguous relationship with religion. Her father was the son of Ashkenazi Jews who left Lithuania in the early 20th century, and her mother was the daughter of Sephardic Jews from Bulgaria, but Sheinbaum does not practice Judaism. On some occasions, she has appeared in clothing adorned with Catholic saints. During her campaign, she met with evangelical leaders.

In her inauguration speech before the Congress, Sheinbaum defined herself as “a mother, grandmother, scientist, and woman of faith, and from today, by the will of the people of Mexico, the constitutional president of the United Mexican States,” she said.

Evangelicals represent around 14 million of Mexico’s 126 million inhabitants. There are no clear statistics on the number of indigenous evangelicals, but Chávez estimates that they may make up 20 percent of the community or about 4.5 million people.

That would make the proportion of evangelicals among indigenous people significantly higher than that in the country at large. And they face strong opposition in their communities, which has contributed to Mexico ranking 37th in the World Watch List, the religious persecution ranking compiled by the organization Open Doors.

“In some indigenous communities, those who decide to abandon ancestral and traditional beliefs to follow Jesus face ostracism, fines, incarceration and forced displacement,” states this year’s Open Doors report.

Evangelicals who refuse to make financial contributions to fund Roman Catholic celebrations may be punished by their neighbors, who cut off their access to services like electricity or water.

The US government has previously questioned Mexican authorities over religious persecution, including mistreatment of indigenous evangelicals. As recently as last year, the State Department’s international religious freedom office reported that diplomats had met with state and federal government officials responsible for religious and indigenous affairs as well as with Catholic Church leaders to express concerns.

In April, neighbors and local authorities attacked the 172 members of a Baptist congregation in the state of Hidalgo, cutting off power to their homes and blocking access to their church. Their attackers explained the raid as punishment because the Christians had not paid “their dues” to the Catholic Church and claimed the right to enforce the customs and traditions of indigenous communities.

Article 2 of the Mexican Constitution guarantees indigenous peoples the right to “apply their own normative systems in the regulation and resolution of their internal conflicts.”

When Christians outside of these communities label indigenous peoples’ practices as witchcraft, their disapproval can add to the pressure on indigenous Christians.

“There are segments of the Christian population who can go so far as to satanize all indigenous principles,” said Chávez. “I call on the church in Mexico and globally to continue teaching our people biblical principles without imposing different cultural forms. It is about respecting culture while teaching a better way.”

- More from Franco Iacomini

Ideas

Bring the Evangel, Leave the ‘Ism’

Janel Breitenstein

The harvest of spiritual seekers today is aplenty, but the mentality of the workers is outdated.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Unsplash

If you grew up in the modern evangelical world, you’re familiar with old-school evangelism methods: walking along a beach, clutching brochures in sweaty hands. Memorizing the Romans Road and cinching knots in beaded, wordless bracelets, we stood ready to deliver our formulaic gospel presentations. And to be clear, methods like these have wrought beautiful eternal ends over the years.

Yet I wonder if our approach to evangelism is evolving as rapidly as the changing culture we hope to love. In 2022, an Evangelism Explosion study released by Lifeway Research reported that 35% of respondents would feel less open to continuing a faith conversation that employed pamphlets, brochures, or phone apps.

We may not see as many Christians handing out tracts today, but there are many modern-day equivalents—impersonal faith-sharing strategies that can leave the hearer with the impression You don’t even see me. Perhaps now via an app, a platitude offered on a social media post, an apologetics argument removed from the soul-questions of the asker—we may inadvertently communicate that the gospel is a one-size-fits-all, plug-and-play solution rather than the Good News of a God who levels his gaze, offers his presence, and engages us directly with our individual stories and needs.

This disconnect also discourages many believers from even wanting to share their faith. Curiously, the same Lifeway study referenced above found that while the majority of Americans are open to faith conversations, most of their Christian friends “rarely talk about their faith.” Likewise, a 2019 Barna report found that while 73% of millennials feel equipped to share their faith, close to half (47%) aren’t sure they even agree with the ethics of evangelism.

Perhaps the reason we feel so uncomfortable sharing the gospel is that our mentality lacks integrity and authenticity and often sees people as projects. But what if we reframed our understanding of evangelism, such that even the most disenchanted could fall in love with sharing their faith?

First, we know much reluctance toward Christianity these days is due to the image problem of the church. Close to one in five non-Christians claim hesitancy toward Christianity due to overpoliticization, and nearly half (42%) of those with no faith report resistance due to the hypocrisy of religious people—unsurprising given the abuse crisis among Christian leaders. Surveys and studies consistently show American Christians are perceived as self-righteous and judgmental or simply inauthentic, unsafe, and irrelevant.

In Evangelism in a Skeptical World, Sam Chan writes, “When our non-Christian friends think of Christianity, they don’t think of good news, salvation, forgiveness, restoration, justice, mercy, or love. Instead, they think of hate, fear, power, and violence.” They see Christians as hating and treating gay people contemptuously, as worse sinners than the ones guilty of any other sinful lifestyle, like those listed in Prov. 6:16–19 or 1 Cor. 6:9–10. In short, for non-Christians who prize the ethics of equality, rights, and justice, Chan reasons, Christians are seen as oppressors rather than friends of the oppressed.

This perception is particularly problematic with Gen Z. Instead of viewing religion as a set of truth claims to be dismissed on its own terms, the next generation is characteristically one of “ethical absolutism, [where] some discard and denounce any religious outlook that seems to produce unpopular ethical conclusions,” observes Benjamin Vincent in a previous CT piece.

Consider, too, the possible need to approach Gen Z and Alpha as we would do for honor/shame cultures of the Majority World. Many young people today are geared toward saving face or, perhaps via cancel culture, “finding ways of shaming people who are considered a threat to their social group,” explains one youth pastor. Rather than revealing Jesus as the antidote to a personal guilt they don’t feel—how might they respond to him as a communal shame-lifter?

In an article entitled “How to Share Jesus so He’s Actually Good News,” Asian American Tony Wee writes of how the guilt-innocence gospel framing failed to reach him growing up in a collectivist family. Even in his youth, Wee cared far more about the shame or honor of his community than about his own individual guilt. And like Wee, most of my own teenagers and their friends hardly seem concerned by personal guilt. But shame? Shame, they understand.

Wee encourages us to consider how the gospel offers radical solutions to a new set of burning questions: “How can we present the good news for their unique longings—to the point they might genuinely find it beautiful (Romans 10:14-15)?” For instance, youth pastor Sean Dotson proposes tracing shame for this generation throughout the Bible and exposing how “Jesus conquers shame through his death and His resurrection,” serving as the scapegoat for the shame of all humanity.

Rest assured, the burning questions and longings are there. As a missionary and mother of teenagers, I see so many of my kids’ peers feeling their way toward God (Acts 17:27)—like the many Gen Zers among the 50,000 people who flocked to the Asbury outpouring. One article [with research on a spirituality-focused app for younger generations] that “most Gen Z (77%) consider themselves spiritual … and over half (51%) of millennials report feeling deep spirituality at least weekly.”

A wider understanding of all God saves us from isn’t just advantageous for non-Christians. In The 3D Gospel: Ministry in Guilt, Shame, and Fear Cultures, Jayson Georges observes that “a one-dimensional gospel […] threatens the veracity and integrity of the Bible. We misread Scripture and construct a sub-biblical view of God. If God does not save us from shame and fear … we severely minimize his glory.”

When we seek to grasp all dimensions of the gospel and its saving power, we put ourselves in a position to know God more deeply and make him known more effectively. To that end, we might ask ourselves what questions the gospel has answered for us and healed in our own hearts.

How have we beheld different facets of God in various seasons of our own lives? Can we truly proclaim that “which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched … concerning the Word of life” (1 John 1:1)? Does our experience of Jesus and his healing demonstrate “the power of God that brings salvation” (Rom. 1:16)?

As Ruth Haley Barton describes in Life Together in Christ, effective evangelism acts as “an invitation to spiritual transformation offered by someone who can bear witness to that transformation in their own life.” Or to paraphrase Spurgeon, we are beggars telling other beggars where we found bread; humility is an irreplaceable ingredient. But before we can rightly offer this sustenance to others, we must first examine how we have personally tasted and seen (Ps. 34:8) Jesus as our Bread of Life (John 6:35)—not just when we were first saved, but for fresh manna day after day.

With that kind of authenticity and self-awareness, initiating conversations about Jesus becomes as natural as it is inescapable. Let what pastor Trevin Wax observes of his believing friend be said of us: “it would have been impossible for us to form a lasting friendship without talking about Christ. His Christianity was so central to his identity that it could not go unnoticed or unmentioned.”

I am always ready to talk about Jesus—whether on the beach, in line at the grocery store, or in the comments of a social media post. I still strike up conversations with people who sit next to me on flights and share testimonies of all that God’s done in my life. Sensitivity to social situations and awareness of others’ needs doesn’t dampen our courage, our urgency, or the frequency with which we share about the love of Jesus. It simply prevents us from doubling as an annoying gong (1 Cor. 13:1).

It’s also easier for us to lean into this authenticity (rather than forcing a “gospel” conversation ill-suited to the moment) when we remember that salvation belongs to God alone (Rev. 7:10) and only the Holy Spirit can truly change a human heart. God’s preferred method of reaching people is through the body of Christ as his ambassadors of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:19–20), but his process is ultimately a long-suffering, journeying one. As Paul said, “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God gave the growth” (1 Cor. 3:6).

Which means, in our approach to evangelism, we must hold in tension both eager exigency and peaceful patience. When I served as a missionary in a Muslim context, I learned about the Engel scale’s fifteen stages of someone’s posture toward Christ—spanning from the time when someone has no awareness of God to the moment they feel comfortable sharing their faith with others. I knew I might never move someone from 1 to 15. But guiding someone from a 3 to a 6? That was cause for gratitude.

Being present, opening ourselves to empathy, and embarking on the often painstaking yet vital process of establishing trust must critically precede any method or strategy. We must prepare ourselves for the long haul of receiving someone’s searing pain or unshakable questions if we are to avoid bypassing the suffering of others, not unlike the priest and the Levite who walked past the man bleeding by the wayside.

Drawing near to those who seem far off empowers us to respond to their church hurt with compassion rather than defense (2 Tim. 2:24). We learn the invaluable skill of active listening (James 1:19), so we know when to pose thoughtful, tell-me-more questions and when to share our own stories (1 Pet. 3:15).

The late Steve Douglass, former president of Cru, once remarked from stage at a missions conference I attended in 2003, “The gospel flows best through the holes in people’s lives.” Each of those holes are specific to the person: No doctor would perform CPR as an antidote to a broken femur. And when we take the time to listen each person’s story and pinpoint their pain, we can offer words of life that bind and heal their unique wounds.

For this reason, Galatians exhorts us to “carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ” (6:2). The former action satisfies the latter command in ways that are messy, self-sacrificial, unique to every person—and decidedly unformulaic. This is, after all, how God bears our burdens.

God descending to dwell with us now and forever—to the point of carrying our sorrows (Isa. 7:14; 53:4)—underscores the steep prerequisite of modeling this all-in love as people first encounter Jesus. Evangelism extends its plea from a high priest who keenly sympathizes with weakness (Heb. 4:15). Christ alone is the unique balm for both my crippling pains and theirs, where God himself shoulders all our suffocating burdens and responds to our overwhelming questions.

Even in his ministry, Jesus responded to vastly differing needs with responses that were equally diverse. Jesus repeatedly addressed his listeners with dignity, engaging their needs with unconditional love—often long before he ever asked them to follow him. As John Marriott reminds us, Christ met each person wherever they were, with kindness that led them to repentance (Rom. 2:4). “Think of the woman at the well,” Marriott writes. “Zacchaeus. The woman caught in adultery. All had rejected him with their lifestyles. But Jesus pursued them, loved them, and kept the conversation going.”

The high calling and standard set by Jesus’ unconditional love does not change, whether its message is accepted or not. Even after Adam and Eve’s rejection of God, courtesy of their sin, he kept leaning in. And in a culture where Christians are viewed as either pretentious or suspicious—and impersonal evangelistic agendas can be sniffed out a mile away—our desire to share the good news about Jesus must be modeled after his example. That is, any compulsion to talk about our faith must proceed from a deep conviction of our own testimony and an even deeper regard for the recipient.

So don’t throw away that impromptu chat on the beach about the hope you have! But just as the Great Commandment precedes the Great Commission in every Gospel, we first love our neighbor, so we evangelize—not the other way around. And in both directives, our obedience to Christ is as urgent as ever.

Janel Breitenstein is the author of Permanent Markers: Spiritual Life Skills to Write on Your Kids’ Hearts and a missionary with Engineering Ministries International, with which she served in Uganda for five years.

- More from Janel Breitenstein

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