A Pastor’s Wife Was Murdered. God Had Prepared Him for It.

Ericka Andersen

In the aftermath of a senseless killing, Davey Blackburn encountered “signs and wonders” hinting at its place in a divine plan.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Unsplash

When disaster strikes, it’s easy to comfort ourselves with empty phrases like “It was a freak accident” or “That’s so unlikely to happen.” Much easier, certainly, than acknowledging that none of us are immune to tragedy. We soothe ourselves with statistics of survival, but inside we know the path of our lives has already been determined. Data is no weapon against God’s sovereignty.

Those unlikely, catastrophic events do happen—as they did to Davey and Amanda Blackburn. Davey, a pastor, had hardly expected to come home one morning and find his pregnant wife fighting to survive on the kitchen floor. He couldn’t have guessed that a violent crime would take Amanda’s life and tear his family apart.

Nearly nine years after Amanda took her last breath, he’s able to see that with God in control, even such brutality isn’t just random senselessness. But the pathway he took to reaching that conclusion wasn’t so smooth. In his new book, Nothing Is Wasted: A True Story of Hope, Forgiveness, and Finding Purpose in Pain, Davey documents his walk through that season of grief, sharing what he learned about trusting God amid horrific tragedy.

‘Things seem too easy’

When I first heard about Amanda’s savage murder, I was eight months pregnant. Only weeks before, I had moved back to my hometown of Indianapolis. Amanda, already the mother of a 2-year-old boy, had been pregnant herself. She lived in downtown Indianapolis, just a few miles from my sister’s house.

The murder hit me deeply as an expectant mom and fellow Christian. Amanda was the picture of an all-American girl, the last person anyone would expect to be killed in a drug-fueled robbery. The community was shaken—heartbroken and shattered for Davey, their son Weston, and Amanda’s close-knit family.

Given Amanda’s close connection to ministry and evangelism, local Christians were especially rocked. Everyone seemed to have a connection to the family, including me, when I discovered a member of my Bible study was Davey’s cousin.

The Blackburns had moved to Indianapolis after feeling God’s call to start a church there. In the book, Davey writes about launching Resonate Church and planting his family in this new Indianapolis community. The church grew, friendships formed, and Amanda’s budding venture as a furniture restorer began to thrive as well. With a second child on the way, their lives seemed charmed—almost too much so.

In the brief time Amanda spent in the hospital before her death, Davey remembered something she had said months prior: “Davey, things seem too easy right now. There’s no way this can last. I feel like we’re about to walk into a tough season.”

As she lay unconscious in the hospital bed, he was convinced God would heal her, but that belief soon passed when doctors told him Amanda was brain-dead. Suddenly, Davey faced a question he never anticipated: What happens when God doesn’t answer our prayers in the way we wish?

This question anchors the narrative of Nothing Is Wasted, where Davey candidly shares his experience in the aftermath of Amanda’s death, recounting depression, confusion, and even sinful responses (like feeling prejudice against men of color because the killers were Black).

To its credit, the book doesn’t advertise “feel-good” Christianese as a formula for overcoming suffering. Rather, it honestly portrays the stages of grief and their effects on one’s faith. “What do I do with God now that it seems His calling actually led us into this tragedy?” writes Davey. “If He were God, couldn’t He have prevented this? And if He were good why wouldn’t he have?”

Readers also get to know Amanda in her own words through some of her journal entries, where she recalled feeling peaceful about moving to Indianapolis and blessed by Hillsong United lyrics that read, “I will take up my cross and follow Lord where You lead me.” We meet a woman who was fully devoted to the Lord and grateful for his hand in nearly every aspect of her life.

The utter injustice of Amanda’s death was nearly impossible for Davey to comprehend. The world without Amanda felt unsettled, dark, and temporary, as he imagined Amanda entering heaven with the little girl he never got to meet, Everett Grace. He writes, “I could feel my heart longing for an otherworldly place—one that would last forever, one that could not be shaken or torn down, one that could not be stolen from me.”

Like many survivors, he also felt guilt—for going to the gym that morning, leaving the car unlocked, and talking on the phone in the driveway before heading back inside. Davey writes of being comforted by Amanda’s father, who assured him that God was not surprised—that he had “orchestrated things ahead of time to show us that He’s in this!”

Davey began seeing small signs of this orchestration at work. A casket was mistakenly sent to the funeral parlor made of reclaimed barn wood, which was Amanda’s favorite material to work with in her furniture restoration business. He then found that the church hosting her celebration of life service had also used reclaimed barn wood to renovate its stage and walls.

Past conversations with Amanda and her detailed journal entries revealed God’s prophetic provision for a future where Davey would be on his own, something they couldn’t have anticipated then. “I know it may not be like this forever, and you may have things ahead of us that are unbearable,” she wrote in a prayer. “When the valleys do come, please keep our family strong.”

These glimpses of God’s providential care shape the book into a guide for those facing tragedy, encouraging them to recognize the supernatural signs of his presence where they least expect it.

An architecture of hope

As Davey put his life back together, a divine architecture of hope took shape. It helped him view Amanda’s killers, at least in part, as victims of their life circumstances. It gave him the freedom to cultivate forgiveness.

Seemingly insignificant memories would resurface in Davey’s mind, illuminating clear markers of God’s preparation for moments of resentment and disorientation. “Your sin and my sin murdered Jesus,” Davey recalled a pastor telling him at seven years old. Remembering this remark, he was reminded that no matter how violent a crime, all sin is deadly in God’s eyes.

Along the way, God provided words of wisdom, encouragement, and prophecy from meticulously placed pastors, friends, and community members. When Davey began having regular nightmares, consistently jolting awake at exactly 6:37 a.m., random friends began texting him with prayers right at that moment each morning. None of them knew about the nightmares.

“You were built for this. You have been placed in this position for such a time as this.” In a serendipitous meeting one day, Davey heard these words from a local Black pastor who worked with inner-city youth like the ones who killed Amanda.

Such confirmations began to appear at every turn. All the signs and wonders could only point back to God, who was leading Davey to something far bigger than himself or Amanda. Davey recalls hearing God say, “I’m a God who restores out of the ruin,” and that he would “completely” restore this situation too.

In one of the book’s most powerful pages, a friend asks Davey if he thinks Amanda would have chosen to move to Indianapolis if she had known her fate in advance. The question floored him, but in considering it, he remembered something Amanda wrote just one day after moving. It read, “I will take up my cross and follow wherever you lead.”

Soon, a rush of other divine moments came flooding back: a night of small-group prayer, when the Holy Spirit had clearly been moving; the morning before Amanda’s death, when Davey found her face-down on the bedroom floor in the posture of a surrendering prayer. He could finally see that Amanda would have said yes to Indianapolis even if she had known what was to come.

Ministry to the grieving

Nothing Is Wasted covers nearly eight years of Davey’s life, showcasing his process of healing and the restoration of his faith, trust, and mission. Without sugarcoating the details, Davey offers a pathway to a deeper purpose within our pain—even the worst kind.

Ultimately, as the court case proceeded against Amanda’s killers, he was able to look them in the eyes and say, “I do not hold this against you.” He recognized a recurring theme amid his pain and the pain of others he met on the journey. Simply put: Nothing is wasted. Our pain and tragedies will be used for God’s purpose and our good, no matter how bad things get.

This realization resulted not only in the book but also in Davey founding the Nothing Is Wasted ministry, through which he hosts a popular podcast, along with classes and retreats for those walking through hard things.

He remarried and had another child, still cherishing the love he had with Amanda and mourning the loss of his unborn daughter. Over the years, he’s faced hurtful rumors, hateful criticism, and even murder accusations, but he walks forward in his divine calling to minister to the grieving.

In this book, readers will find resonance, hope, and a truth that holds even in the darkest of nights.

Ericka Andersen is a weekly columnist at World magazine. She is the author of Reason to Return: Why Women Need the Church and the Church Needs Women.

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Culture

Taste and See If the Show is Good

Kate Lucky

Staff Editor

Christians like to talk up pop culture’s resonance with our faith. But what matters more is our own conformity to Christ.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

Of this year’s Emmy-nominated television shows, my husband and I have watched all of The Crown, a fair bit of Abbott Elementary, and a couple episodes of Only Murders in the Building. We used to have a Hulu subscription, so we watched the first season of The Bear and several seasons of What We Do in the Shadows. (We’ve since canceled our subscription, so regrettably, no Reservation Dogs.)

Ask me what I liked or disliked about any of these shows, and I can tell you: the dialogue, the sets, the costumes, the pacing. But you might not agree with my verdicts. I find What We Do in the Shadows, a show about vampires living on Staten Island, extraordinarily funny. Laugh-out-loud funny. But Ted Lasso, a show about a soccer team? Three years ago, it took the Emmys by storm. I have friends who love it. But I watched, and I’m sorry … Ted Lasso just isn’t for me.

Taste. As the saying goes, there’s no accounting for it—but Christians are certainly inclined to try. We’re told to turn our thoughts to “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable” (Phil. 4:8). So which paintings and novels and TV shows qualify?

I think this is the wrong question to ask. As CT’s culture editor, I often encounter writers trying to discuss their favorite pop albums or hit summer movies this way. Don’t worry, they argue, this is actually Christian! Or at least it has Christian themes. The film mentions gardens and water and wine. The song touches on love and hope in ways that resonate with Scripture. It’s okay for Christians to like this show because it’s not just good TV. It’s true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and admirable.

This kind of analysis usually falls flat. It tends to feel like a stretch—silly at best, disingenuous at worst. And yet, I understand the appeal. We don’t want the works of art we love to run counter to the claims of our faith. We want to follow Paul’s injunction to “set our minds on things above,” so we go looking for loftiness in sitcoms and pop songs (Col. 3:2). We fear returning to a reflexive fundamentalism that sees “worldly” music, literature, or cinema as inherently dangerous.

Truth is, the best music, literature, and cinema do reference our faith, in a way. These works tell stories, and Christianity tells the grand story underneath them all. Insofar as works of art tell the truth about human nature and the world in which we live, we’ll be able to find those threads of connection—even if only as simple as “sin is real.”

The gospel of Jesus makes sense of sacrifice and typifies love, and distinguishes life from death. Now, as in the beginning, there is the Word, undergirding comedy and tragedy, absurdity and futility, suffering and joy. In that sense, every artwork is that Athenian altar of Acts 17, inscribed to a too-often unknown God.

But whether a television show gets us thinking about what’s noble and pure often has less to do with the show itself and more to do with us as viewers. For Paul, the altar to the unknown God was the basis for a sermon pointing to the God he knew in Christ Jesus. Yet for thousands of Athenians who’d passed it day in and day out for decades, it made no such connection.

Rephrasing my earlier question, then: Which paintings and novels and TV shows qualify for me?

Which pieces of art can move each of us—with our unique aesthetic sensibilities, our God-given proclivities for particular jokes, our besetting sins—to reflect on what’s admirable and right?

Posing the question this way doesn’t disregard the guidelines in Philippians 4:8. Some films or songs or texts—such as those with wildly gratuitous violence or pornographic sexuality—will never help any of us meditate on things above. Art isn’t like meat sacrificed to idols (1 Cor. 8:4–8); it’s not all neutral for the Christian. Not everything is on the table.

Yet this approach does allow for personality, flexibility, and yes, taste. I reveled in the award-winning show Breaking Bad and its companion, Better Call Saul. Those series are violent, but they didn’t tempt me to wrath. I spent the days after each episode meditating on good intentions and underlying motives and how susceptible we are to faulty explanations of our own behavior.

But Baby Reindeer I couldn’t stomach. Its portrayal of human brokenness aligned with my understanding of sin-corrupted reality. But the show’s depictions of sexual violence made me queasy; they stuck with me too long after I’d turned off the TV. The show felt dark; it made me feel dark. I decided not to finish the series.

The reverse may have been true for a different believer: yes to Baby Reindeer, no to Breaking Bad. In that sense, art is like that idol-sacrificed meat: A stumbling block for one of us won’t be for the other (1 Cor. 8:9–13).

This makes the task of the Christian critic at once more difficult and more interesting. Our job is not to justify our taste in culture but to explain what we see from a vantage point oriented to Christ. Not, This art is actually kinda Christian, but rather, Here’s what I realized as a Christian encountering this art.

We needn’t try to force cultural artifacts into a set of parameters they were never meant to meet, grading on a curve so our favorites get a pass. Instead, we come to those artifacts as changed people, minds renewed, and see what there is to see.

This is not how most of us think about taste today, whether we are Christians or not, but it harkens to an older tradition. Once, philosophers thought of taste not in terms of “what band you like, what books you read, what clothes you wear,” writer Kyle Chayka explained in a recent interview with the critic Ezra Klein. They understood it rather “as a more fundamental human experience, like a moral capacity, a way of judging what’s around you and evaluating what’s good and … almost making it part of yourself.”

Developing taste like that will require confidence, born of sanctification and informed by the Spirit, about what is good and worthy of our attention. It will require humility, too, about our own capacity to see rightly, our self-flattering accounts of what we like and dislike, and the fact that our minds could always change, perhaps from the benefit of another believer’s view.

This is how I hope my own taste will come to operate as a Christian culture critic: as a bellwether for the admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy. As an aid to my faith. As a means of encountering God in a brushstroke, a laugh line, a well-written truth.

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

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Ideas

The Church Can Help End the Phone-Based Childhood

Emily Crouch

Christians fought for laws to protect children during the Industrial Revolution. We can do it again in the smartphone age.

Edits by CT / Source Images: Library of Congress / Pexels

As American kids head back to school this fall, many will do so with smartphones in hand. The average age at which American kids receive their first phone is just 11, and most public schools only ban nonacademic classroom phone use—and struggle to enforce even that.

We know this is a problem. Research from academics like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge continues to show American young people are in a mental health crisis, and there’s compelling evidence that the phone-based childhood is the leading cause. And the church is not an outlier here; if you’ve worked in youth ministry recently, you understand the challenges that come with a room full of teens who are chronically online. If you’re young yourself, you understand how tightly tech use is linked to belonging and how difficult it can be to pull your attention away from your own device out of fear that you may be missing out.

Christians have already begun to consider how churches can encourage safer digital media use in ministry and approach tech use as a matter for discipleship. But I want to recommend another response with a long history in the church: political discipleship.

If we believe that the gospel has the power to speak to our whole lives, we must recognize that this includes our digital lives, and not just individually but together: as families and congregations, yes, but also in politics. Political discipleship—how we follow God as people rooted in a certain time and place in a political community—can be part of how we love and serve God and neighbor in our digital age.

I understand why some Christians are wary of getting involved in politics and government, whether for theological or historical reasons or simply because of skepticism about the government’s ability to do anything productive. But if we have the opportunity to advocate for public policies that promote safety and flourishing for us and our neighbors, we must steward that responsibility well, like the servants in the parable of the talents in Matthew 25. From time to time, we may have a duty to step into the role of advocate for those who cannot advocate for themselves.

That particularly means children and teenagers whose families do not have the knowledge, resources, or wherewithal to make limiting screen time a priority. Low-income children are two to three times as likely as their peers to develop mental health conditions, and some research shows that they’re also more likely to spend a lot of time online. Phone-free public schools would provide at least some respite from intentionally addictive digital media.

So how has the church historically engaged in political discipleship for the good of our neighbors? Christians who navigated the rapid technological, economic, and social changes of the Industrial Revolution provide examples we can learn from today.

The shift from agrarian to industrial economies in the US and UK brought with it new convenience and opportunities, but also new dangers for children. Sound familiar? It may be difficult for us to imagine now, but this was an era without mandatory schooling or many safety regulations. Children often worked alongside parents or other adults in fields or factories.

Without the labor laws we now take for granted, children sometimes worked 16-hour days or longer. They had few breaks. Injuries were common, and no special care was taken for children. Even child prostitution was found in many workplaces, as historian Penelope Carson wrote for Christian History, and there “were no safety regulations, and financial penalties and beatings were imposed for the slightest slip or misdemeanor. Accidents and deaths were all too common.” Orphans were particularly vulnerable, with no guardians to intervene on their behalf.

But some Christians did intervene, playing an integral role in the passage of child labor laws on both sides of the Atlantic. Richard Oastler, a devout Methodist and abolitionist of the 19th century, began spreading public awareness once he learned how children were treated in British factories. Then, he sought legal solutions to ensure the protection of children. Oastler’s sometimes radical methods and rhetoric got him in trouble more than once, but his concern for the poor and victims of injustice helped pass the UK’s Factory Acts of 1833 and 1847, which limited work hours for women and children.

Decades later, in the US, an Episcopalian priest named Edgar Gardner Murphy was concerned for the well-being of children working in mills. For years, he advocated for legislation that would shorten the hours children worked, raise the age of children working in factories and mines, and outlaw overnight work. Understanding that reforms were essential to protect children from employers and sometimes their own parents, he established the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) in 1904 to spread awareness and advance policy solutions.

Just two years after the establishment of the NCLC, conversations about reforming child labor laws were elevated from a state to a federal level, and the committee succeeded in highlighting both the injustice of child labor and the benefits that public schooling would provide. Many parents and employers were content with the status quo, but photographs taken by Lewis W. Hine exposed the plight of children working in factories and mines, prompting legislative action.

Smartphones don’t pose the same physical dangers as early industrial mines or cotton mills, but their risk for American children is real. So is Christians’ responsibility to intervene on vulnerable kids’ behalf by advocating for better public policy around tech in public schools.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that our advocacy will succeed. History and current polls alike suggest that in spite of our best efforts, proposals to protect kids online have a high chance of failure. Many parents—and certainly many kids—would rather maintain the status quo. That possibility shouldn’t discourage us from trying.

In a speech at the International Christian Political Conference in 1977, Sen. Mark Hatfield of Oregon listed many bills he had championed or voted for because of his Christian faith. “As it happens,” he continued, “each of these proposals was defeated. Yet in each case, a witness was borne, I trust, to the goals which would move us in the direction of the kingdom, as I understand it.” Even if we don’t get the policies we want, we can still practice this kind of faithfulness in the public square. We can still bear witness to the hope we have in Christ, trusting that God will accomplish justice.

At a practical level, Christians—and especially pastors and other church leaders—should build relationships with school board members, state and local officials, and even members of Congress who can shape tech policies in our local schools. We can make the case to these leaders, just as Oastler did with British policymakers two centuries ago, that we have both the duty and ability to better protect vulnerable youth and families in our communities—to better love our neighbors.

Emily Crouch is a public policy and communications professional living and working in Alexandria, Virginia. She leads college student programming and the fellowship for early-career congressional leadership development at the Center for Public Justice.

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Books

Review

New & Noteworthy

Matt Reynolds

Chosen by Matt Reynolds, CT senior books editor.

Illustration by Tara Anand

Great to Good

Jae Hoon Lee (IVP)

Highly driven performers and organizational leaders often speak of making the leap from good to great. As his book title suggests, Korean pastor Jae Hoon Lee believes the church (and individual Christians) should invert that mindset, pursuing Christlike character rather than earthly power and glory. “Jesus referred to himself as a good shepherd, not a great one,” writes Lee, whose reflections draw upon his Korean church context. “He attributed his accomplishments to God, not to himself. After all, God was the One who raised him up. So, the church should follow his example of humility, service, and meekness instead of trying to elevate itself unnecessarily.”

Nearing a Far God

Leslie Leyland Fields (NavPress)

The Psalms, as believers have long affirmed, furnish language for pouring out our whole hearts in prayer. Writer Leslie Leyland Fields builds on this foundation in Nearing a Far God, showing how these sacred poems help us compose our own cries of sorrow and joy, praise and lament. “We’re not rewriting Scripture,” Fields cautions about her book, which includes a series of writing and prayer exercises. “The Psalms cannot rewrite us if we are rewriting the Psalms. Instead, we are allowing the Psalms to teach us to pray, to guide our own words and emotions as we seek God’s face, and to lead us to listen more closely to the response of his Word.”

A New and Ancient Evangelism

Judith Paulsen (Baker Academic)

One can understand why nonbelievers might be queasy about the idea of evangelism. But similar attitudes run surprisingly deep in Christian circles, as evangelism professor Judith Paulsen reports in this book. Paulsen, who teaches at Wycliffe College in Toronto, looks to New Testament conversion stories for guidance on repairing the reputation and reviving the practice of sharing the gospel. By “delving deeply” into these stories, she hopes “the church in the West can again learn ancient wisdom about how God draws people to himself and how, empowered by the Holy Spirit, we as the people of God can be his instruments in that great venture.”

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Books

Review

A Subtler Political Idolatry

Matt Reynolds

We don’t always like our presidents. But we’re apt to exalt the presidency.

As a college student, I never missed a State of the Union address. Feeling a sense of patriotic duty, I sat through the whole bloated spectacle: the obsequious handshakes, interminable applause, and extravagant promises to vanquish foes, blot out injustice, and kickstart a golden age of prosperity.

But over time, I came to see all that for what it was. Then came a series of epiphanies about other allegedly sacred observances. Presidential debates? A wasteland of sound bites. The nominating conventions? Pointless pep rallies. Election night coverage? Instead of wasting hours, I can access the results online in seconds.

Why do so many people feel they owe reverence to the Oval Office? Perhaps it’s one sign we’ve succumbed to what political analyst Gene Healy, in his 2008 book of the same name, calls “the cult of the presidency.”

Five election cycles after publication, Healy’s book is worth revisiting for its still-fresh perspective and unfortunately forgotten wisdom. (The purpose of this column, for those just discovering it, is revisiting books that are neither brand new nor really old).

Healy’s work, subtitled America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power, can usefully reframe well-worn evangelical conversations about political idolatry, though it wasn’t written with Christians in mind.

We often bemoan flagrant departures from Christ-centered faith, like Christian nationalism or blind loyalty to Team Red or Team Blue. But the presidential “cult” operates on a lower wavelength, Healy argues. Even if you keep a healthy distance from partisan spectacle, you might have fallen under its sway.

This tendency can be easier to see if we distinguish individual leaders from the office itself. Americans are fond of dismissing particular presidents as fools, knaves, and charlatans. Yet we still expect the White House to work wonders, Healy observes, pining for the president to heal society’s every ill.

That’s not how our government is constitutionally designed. Over 250 years, however, an office envisioned as humble and unglamorous gradually acquired grandiose trappings. The State of the Union, for instance, was originally a practical, written update for lawmakers, and the notion of one man waxing eloquent from Olympian heights would’ve sent shivers down Madisonian spines.

How quaint that seems today! So does the bygone norm against presidents venturing opinions on legislative matters, lest they be seen as stepping on Congress’s toes. From our vantage point, it’s shocking to learn of the informal codes Healy details that once discouraged presidential candidates from appealing directly to the public on behalf of their own ambitions.

In Healy’s telling, the presidency changed irreparably with “transformational” figures, like Woodrow Wilson and both Roosevelts, who saw constitutional limits as anachronistic and ill-suited to modern life. They and most of their successors crafted the office we know today, with staggering power over policy and public opinion.

A Cato Institute researcher, Healy writes as a libertarian who decries elements of crusading moralism in both parties. As such, he appreciates how immodest conceptions of presidential duty precipitate abuses of power, from domestic espionage and suppression of dissent to bloody misadventures overseas. George W. Bush, in office when Healy was writing, earns especially low marks for ignoring constitutional strictures in the name of fighting terror.

Stranger, though no less unsettling, is the spiritual component of this “cult.” Why do we imagine that one person can fulfill our highest hopes? Why, after every natural disaster, does the president don the mantle of national chaplain? Why do we anoint mere mortals as moral tone-setters and purpose-givers for the defiantly pluralistic masses? The error here should be especially obvious to Christians, yet we often fall into these habits as easily as other Americans.

I was surprised to see Healy close on a guardedly optimistic note. Yes, he concedes, presidents of both parties will always be tempted to misuse the power of the office. Yes, our grueling campaign gauntlets favor egotists and demagogues over decent, self-effacing public servants. And yes, even the children of democracy have an incurable craving for kings.

But more than ever, Healy argues, our political culture fosters a healthy distrust of authority and an awareness of corruption in high places. And it permits a style of withering mockery that echoes an earlier, more raucous era of political discourse.

That’s all true, yet I left The Cult of the Presidency wondering whether its critique goes far enough. Healy focuses on what presidents do in office, largely overlooking another important factor: how we memorialize our presidents, inflating their legacies to mythic dimensions. Consider the Capitol rotunda painting Apotheosis of Washington or narratives casting Abraham Lincoln as a Christ figure.

It’s possible too that Healy underrates the media’s role in entrenching presidential monomania. He lands some satisfying blows against prominent pundits who daydream about heroic leaders and causes. But rank-and-file journalists form their own consuming attachments. Why do they crowd into White House press conferences when so many local city councils, regulatory commissions, school boards, and police departments could stand some extra scrutiny? Why do they grumble indignantly when presidents decline to dominate the public conversation with constant speeches and interviews?

Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump took office after Healy was writing, but, with hindsight, they seem like tokens of his prescience. In both, we witness a creeping triumph of symbolism over statesmanlike substance, each politician becoming a totemic embodiment of a warring subculture. In Obama, progressives see the urbane intellectualism they cherish in themselves. In Trump, populist conservatives see their own dukes raised against elite condescension.

Ultimately, Healy argues, the heroic president ideal persists because the people desire heroic presidents. But this durability also hints at a vulnerability: At the level of law and practice, it would take years to newly restrain our chief executives. But citizens enjoy an enviable freedom—and Christians a blessed imperative—to fix our affections elsewhere.

After all, the White House isn’t a literal temple, and the president can’t make you literally bend the knee or burn a pinch of incense. Whatever it costs to break away from the cult of the presidency, it won’t land you in the lion’s den.

Matt Reynolds is senior books editor for Christianity Today.

The Beckoning Nightstand

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Books

Review

Sincerely, Your Spiritual Mentor

Uche Anizor

In a collection of letters, theologian Brad East counsels believers whose faith is genuine but untutored.

Illustration by Weston Wei

I have often longed for my own personal trainer, not so much for getting in better physical shape but for better understanding the whats and hows of Christian faith.

To some degree, such training is the aim of those like me, who teach theology in a formal setting. But we can only accomplish so much in a 15-week class period. Parents, too, are (hopefully) striving to train children in the faith without sounding overly preachy.

Whatever my own relative success or failure in either arena, I’m convinced that one of the best ways to pass on the faith is through extended conversation with a wise mentor.

In Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry, theology professor Brad East turns to this model, offering a distinctive blend of theological instruction and spiritual mentorship.

East’s book offers 93 such letters, covering the whole of Christian doctrine, from the nature of the Trinity to the unfolding of the last things, while providing clear teaching on the Incarnation, Christ’s atonement, the church, sacraments, the Christian life, prayer, and more.

East’s intended audience is young Christians whose faith is sincere but relatively “untutored.” He addresses the recipient of his letters as “future saint,” drawing attention to the fact that, while we are saints right now, our full sainthood, or holiness, awaits the return of Christ.

East hopes his instruction will help prod us further down the path of sainthood. In short, his book seeks to catechize readers, not in a typical question-and-answer format but by giving brief, thoughtful explanations of central themes—and thorny issues—within Christian theology.

What, according to East, is Christianity all about? The answer, quite simply, is Christ. In these letters, that is more than a banal statement. In every section of the book, East makes it clear that being a Christian is about looking to Christ. It’s about gazing at the beauty of Christ that makes costly discipleship worth it. It’s about knowing and loving Christ, and being the people of Christ.

East writes in an ecumenical spirit, drawing from historic church tradition and seeking to articulate a brand of “mere Christianity.” He will ruffle some feathers here and there, perhaps, with his positive views on evolution, support for infant baptism, and regular talk of “saints.” His aim, however, is to present what most Christians can get onboard with.

Along the way, there are several theological gems that I will mention only in brief. First, in East’s discussion of the image of God, he supplements standard accounts of this doctrine by suggesting that the imago Dei is expressed as we live out of Christ’s threefold office of prophet, priest, and king. In this sense, the image of God shines brightest in the imitation of Christ, who is the image of God.

Second, East gives clear reasons for Christ’s ascension, that most neglected aspect of the Lord’s redemptive work. Christ ascends in order to (1) send the Spirit, (2) be glorified, and (3) continue his work as priest, among other things.

Third, East faces head-on a question many have asked: What’s the practical value of knowing the doctrine of the Trinity? His response can be summed up like this: The Trinity matters because God matters. If you want to know God, you must know the Trinity. Further, the Trinity matters because the gospel only makes sense (and is good news) if God is triune. No Trinity, no gospel. It doesn’t get more practical than that!

Importantly, East digs beneath these and other matters of theology to consider our broader “family history,” rooted in the relationship between the church and Israel. This is a complex relationship that invites perennial debate. But East is deliberate in linking the church’s identity to Abraham and Israel. “If you want to know God,” East counsels, “start here.” Or, more poignantly, “If you want to know God, you must know Christ. If you want to know Christ, you must know the Jews.”

Even one of East’s summaries of the gospel has Abraham and Israel at the center. If “you had to sum up the gospel with a single word,” he asks, “what would it be? My choice: adoption. Gentiles are adopted as Abraham’s children, and all people, gentiles and Jews both, are adopted as God’s children. To be adopted by one is to be adopted by the other.”

One more comment on the Israel-church relationship: East cautions against viewing Israel’s history as merely a history of failure. He argues, first, that “Israel’s history is like the history of every other people, because it is an altogether human history. It contains glories and triumphs alongside defeats and disasters.” On top of this, there are many examples of mighty faith in Israel’s history. These are the models we are encouraged to remember in Hebrews 11.

By remembering our solidarity with Israel, we can avoid viewing Israel as a botched experiment in holiness and the church as a merciful upgrade. “We must not say,” writes East, “that the Jews were God’s people and now (Christian) gentiles are God’s people. That involves a callous, in fact disastrous, revision of God’s story, his own word, his very heart.”

If Letters to a Future Saint were a typical theology primer, it would be difficult to accommodate some of the practical or existential questions East addresses so admirably. My favorite practical foray is his treatment of doubt.

He first describes our cultural moment: “Doubt is in vogue. It’s often held up as a kind of ideal. … I’ve heard more than a few ministers say that no Christian is a serious follower of Jesus until he or she has seriously doubted the truth of the gospel.”

To this, he responds pungently, “What a bunch of baloney.” He acknowledges what’s good about the pro-doubt impulse: the way it validates questions, creating space for disagreement in nonessential areas, and removes shame from Christians who ask them. East cautions, however, that while doubt is normal for Christians, it is not required for Christian maturity. For some it’s a “way station,” but it’s never a “landing spot.”

We are after faithfulness and maturity, not more questions. “Martyrs,” in East’s fine phrasing, “don’t die for a question mark.” Rather than valorizing doubt as such, East concludes with an invitation to “keep asking questions. Never stop. But ask questions in search of the truth.”

Given the personal and introductory nature of the book, you might not expect to find nuanced discussions of tough theological and philosophical topics. Yet East does not shy away from these, even though the book is avowedly for newer believers.

One example is his treatment of how God creates through the agency of human “creators”—as in the case of human conception. He writes in a simultaneously theological and devotional key:

What we discover, when God works his will through us, is this. Far from a violation of our freedom or a coercion of our wills, we find ourselves more fully alive—happiest, freest, holiest. We are, by a great mystery, our truest and deepest selves. When we cling to our lives and our wills, we lose them. When we lose them in God, we receive them back in unlosable form.

This relates to how East addresses the difficult issue of moral responsibility in a fallen world. He shows that God has every right to hold us responsible for sins resulting largely from a sinful disposition we received from Adam. Just as a person genetically disposed to addiction and drunkenness is responsible for killing someone in a drunk driving accident, we remain responsible for our sins, despite inheriting the legacy of original sin.

As a theologian, I could nitpick about the strange flow of the book. It begins with a focus on discipleship, worship, and prayer, then proceeds to discuss Abraham and Israel before finally turning to particular doctrines. In fact, no formal treatment of the Trinity appears until the 52nd letter!

If this were a standard theology textbook, that might be a point against it. But East’s placement is actually a touch of pastoral wisdom. In earlier parts of the book, he has assumed and, in many ways, waxed eloquent on the Trinitarian nature of Christianity. He pictures his readers having been baptized into the Trinitarian faith. They’ve come to know Jesus and received the Spirit, and they pray to the Father on that basis.

So, rather than beginning with Trinitarian puzzles to solve, he begins with our discipleship and our story (which is Israel’s story). Along the way, he’s developing a picture of God as creator, redeemer, and covenant partner. By the time we get to the Trinity, then, we have a deeply personal and experiential portrayal of God, one that prepares us to receive the picture of God in three persons as something other than a cold, mathematical formula.

This pastoral judgment brings us back to the question of theology’s form. In other words, what is the best way to teach theology and pass on the Christian faith? While East’s book may not answer that question decisively, it does demonstrate that sage letters are an effective and engaging option for training the next generation of saints.

Uche Anizor is associate professor of theology at Biola University’s Talbot School of Theology. He is the author of Overcoming Apathy: Gospel Hope for Those Who Struggle to Care.

This article appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Training Saints".

- More from Uche Anizor

Books

Review

Tracing the Bible’s History Through Time and Space

David W. Kling

Bruce Gordon shows how believers in every era have experienced their sacred book through all the human senses.

Illustration by Mark Pernice

In one of his many insightful essays, the late missiologist Andrew Walls asked whether one could detect a coherence or continuity over 2,000 years of Christian history. He proposed that one theme stood out most: the ultimate significance of Jesus. Beyond that, he noted that Christians have affirmed the same sacred writings, instituted some form of baptism and Communion, and displayed an awareness of their historical connection to other Christians.

Walls didn’t prioritize the influence of these other enduring facets of the faith. One wonders, though, whether this framing understates the centrality of the Bible. After all, Scripture is the source of what we know about Jesus, the two basic Christian rituals, and the “communion of the saints.”

In all its variety, Christianity is a religion of God’s address to humanity, communicated through the words of Scripture. Indeed, as Bruce Gordon argues so eloquently in The Bible: A Global History, the sacred text “is the story of a life force,” rooted in our “ongoing effort to hear God.”

Gordon’s substantial book is a welcome first. Much contemporary scholarship on the Bible’s history has focused on questions of how it came into existence and whether we can trust its historical claims.

To be sure, Gordon engages these issues. But they are secondary concerns in a narrative emphasizing how the Bible was produced, copied, adorned, illustrated, memorized, printed, marketed, commodified, distributed, annotated, translated, sung, and interpreted across the ages.

Gordon’s compelling, sensitive, accessible, and balanced work is a Christian people’s history of the Bible through time and space. It’s a story of how Christians have lived in and through the text in countless ways, both “positively and negatively,” through “all the human senses.”

Evangelicals tend to approach the Bible as mainly a devotional book, something to be read and understood for the sake of furthering spiritual growth. Gordon’s history by no means discounts this approach. It demonstrates, though, that throughout most of Christian history, the Bible was heard, performed, or seen, not read.

Reading Gordon’s work, three major themes come to the forefront: We see believers treating the Bible as an object of devotion. We see them translating the Bible into different languages, idioms, and cultural contexts. And we see them engaging with the Bible as a channel of personal communication from God.

First, Gordon considers the Bible as an object of devotion. The process of composing and assembling biblical books into what we know as the canon was gradual, reflecting the worship, devotional, and reading needs of the early Christian community. In total, though, it launched a communication revolution, in that the resulting Bible was meant for all, literate or not.

By the fourth century, the codex had replaced the scroll as the predominant biblical format. As a result, the Bible came into its own, since it was now easier to transport. Scriptoriums arose in monasteries or households, where scribes copied the sacred text in ascetic acts of devotion. As Gordon notes, “By the fifth century, the Bible as book had become an incarnation of the divine, its physical presence in the world.” The medium was inseparable from the saving message.

Throughout the medieval period, the very material form of the Bible evoked a sense of the sacred. To see or touch a Bible, to chant its words or raise it aloft in a holy procession, conjured feelings of awe and reverence. Irish monks, influenced by Byzantine tradition, adorned Bible covers with jewels, illuminated biblical manuscripts in gold, and embellished their Bibles with images of animals and plants and elegant geometric patterns.

In the later medieval period, the stained-glass windows in great cathedrals visually narrated the biblical story from creation to redemption to consummation. The Bible was spoken in the Mass, heard in popular preaching, and performed in processions and stage plays. “Without a doubt,” writes Gordon, a scholar of the Reformation, “one of the greatest mistruths perpetuated by the Protestant Reformation is that the Bible disappeared during the Middle Ages.”

Next, Gordon examines the Bible in translation. As Scripture emerged in book form, so did competing versions.

Jerome’s well-known Vulgate translation appeared late in the fourth century. Even before then, the Bible, in whole or in part, had been translated into Syriac and Persian in the East, Egyptian Coptic in North Africa, and Latin and Gothic in the West. To be sure, Jerome’s translation prevailed in the Catholic church, but a vast multitude of Old Latin versions persisted alongside it for half a millennium.

In the 15th century, approximately 70 vernacular translations existed, belying Martin Luther’s claim that no one had access to the Bible before his 1521 German New Testament translation. “By the end of the Middle Ages,” writes Gordon, “vernacular Bibles had never before been so widely owned and read.”

As the Bible became more accessible in more languages, it also became a lightning rod for disagreement. And as sola Scriptura became the Protestant baseline of authority, it also helped fuel the proliferation of Protestant groups claiming fidelity to their interpretation of the Bible.

Gordon dedicates an entire chapter to the widely cherished King James Version (1611). To this day, the KJV remains the most widely read version around the world, its memorable words and phrases firmly engrained in the cultural heritage of the West.

Unlike its predecessor, the Geneva Bible—with its Reformed emphasis and controversial annotations—the KJV was produced without notes or commentary. Unbeknownst to many who grew up with the KJV, its language was purposely antiquated (thee and thou had already disappeared from common parlance) to give the appearance of solemnity and refinement. The “strangeness” of the KJV “conveyed the holy and transcendent,” writes Gordon, just as Latin had done for Catholics of earlier eras.

By the mid-19th century, however, as the Bible received increasing scrutiny, the KJV became less a book of faith than a literary treasure of England, prompting T. S. Eliot to comment, “Those who talk about the Bible as a ‘monument of English prose’ are merely admiring it over the grave of Christianity.”

Beginning in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, British, American, and European Protestant missionaries undertook ambitious translation projects to make the Bible available in local languages. As is well known, the results were mixed.

On one hand, missionaries could not shed their Western prejudices and identification with colonialism and imperialism. In some cases they used the Bible to oppress and suppress traditional cultures. On the other hand, in translating the Bible into mother tongues, missionaries provided Indigenous peoples with tools for questioning the claims of Western superiority. Converts found themselves in the text of Scripture, claimed the Bible as their own, and interpreted it through the lens of their culture. In Africa, Gordon notes, “the overall success” of translation efforts “can hardly be overstated.”

One of the most confounding and contentious translation issues concerned proper names for God. China serves as one example, with its polytheistic culture lacking any conceptual equivalent of the Christian God or the Trinity. In the 16th century, Jesuits settled upon Tianzhu (“Lord of Heaven”), though no Catholic translations of the Bible appeared in China until two centuries later.

Then, in the 1840s, members of a joint Protestant American and British translating team disagreed passionately over the correct name for God, igniting what became known as the “term question.” So intense was the dispute—the Americans favored Shen (“Spirit”) whereas the British favored Shandi (“Sovereign on High”)—that two separate Bibles were published in classical Chinese. In 1919, a more reader-friendly Bible appeared in Mandarin, again in two versions that reflected the naming impasse.

Translators faced similar difficulties in Africa. How transferrable were the names of African deities into Christ-ian theological contexts? One proposed solution, which today appears in 30 African languages, was the Bantu name Muhungu (later Mungu), connoting a distant creator. Jesus received the name mwana wa Mulungu (or “child of Mulungu”).

Last, Gordon addresses the Bible as a mode of personal communication. Indeed, a major theme in the last two-thirds of the book, which covers the ages of Puritanism, pietism, evangelicalism, and Pentecostalism, is “the Bible’s promise of a personal relationship with God.” As Gordon frequently points out, believers have long found themselves in the Bible’s pages, believing that God, with the Holy Spirit’s aid, was speaking to them directly.

Puritans promoted a culture of personal Bible reading, diary-keeping, and meditation. Pietist and evangelical women spoke of identifying with particular biblical figures. Methodists situated themselves in the biblical narrative through the hymns of the Wesley brothers.

Even as proslavery advocates appealed to Scripture, African American slaves intoned Bible-based spirituals of resistance and freedom. Hong Xiuquan, the apocalyptic leader of the murderous Taiping Rebellion in China, interpreted his visions by reading the Book of Revelation. The Liberian prophet William Wadé Harris saw himself as a successor to Moses, Elijah, and Jesus.

Pentecostals claim to hear God speaking directly through the Bible. In their view, the supernatural occurrences in Scripture—gifts of the Spirit, exorcisms, healings, Spirit baptism—are as real today as they were in New Testament times. “The physicality of the Pentecostal encounter with the Bible,” writes Gordon, “is intimate, a full transformation of the whole person into life in the Spirit.”

The Bible is a remarkable work of original synthesis, weaving many strands of scholarship into a coherent and lively narrative. One could point to minor oversights. For example, Gordon omits the prodigious efforts of Wycliffe Bible Translators, an evangelical organization that has translated the Bible into more than 700 languages. More could be said, too, about the potential implications of our shift toward reading the Bible on electronic platforms.

More substantively, Gordon concludes with a promising, if somewhat underdeveloped, claim that “the Bible’s global history is a reason for hope.” To support his assertion, he notes the increased accessibility of the Bible on the global stage, the numerous translations that enable people to see themselves within its narrative, and the multiple readings of Scripture and niche Bibles that speak to the needs of particular communities of faith.

These developments reinforce Gordon’s thesis that “every claim to the clarity of the Bible, from Augustine and Martin Luther to Billy Graham, has been immediately challenged.” There’s no question that Christians have long disagreed civilly and sometimes violently over beliefs and practices derived from Scripture.

But if the Bible is “the greatest story ever told,” if it offers grounds for hope, surely the ultimate reason is just what Andrew Walls has proposed: the significance of Jesus and the gospel message. Is it possible to separate the (admittedly messy) story of the Bible’s history from the one whose life, death, and resurrection brought it into being? Those are the perennial questions at the heart of Gordon’s splendid book.

David W. Kling is a professor of religious studies at the University of Miami. He is the author of The Bible in History: How the Texts Have Shaped the Times and A History of Christian Conversion.

This article appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "The Bible in Time and Space".

- More from David W. Kling

News

Called to Kenya’s Chinatowns

Sophia Lee

Even other Christians thought it was strange when two Kenyans wanted to evangelize their Chinese neighbors.

Photography by KC Cheng

Daive Njuguna’s first Chinese class at the University of Nairobi was the most fun he’d ever had in college. The teacher was a jovial young woman from China who cheerfully corrected her students as they struggled to pronounce ni hao (hello) and qing (please) and xie xie (thank you). Njuguna laughed throughout the class.

He was only vaguely aware that the Chinese government was funding the course via the Confucius Institute, part of Beijing’s “cultural soft power” offensive to broaden its global influence.

The videos that Njuguna’s teacher played in class were designed to impress students with the superiority of the Chinese way. But what Njuguna thought as he watched those videos was These people really need the gospel.

That was in 2018, a few months after Njuguna had heard on the radio that the Chinese government persecutes Christians and had begun praying for them. He knew there was a growing, if largely out-of-sight, Chinese population in Kenya.

So he also prayed, “Lord, I want to get more involved with the Chinese. But where are they?”

Within the past decade, thousands of Chinese workers have migrated to Kenya. They have built expressways and railways and condos and malls; opened supermarkets and eateries, selling tongue-numbing Sichuan pork and grilled lamb skewers; and established themselves as hawkers of toys and electronics at one of Nairobi’s largest open-air markets.

Kenya keeps no official count of its Chinese population, though estimates range from 20,000 to 40,000 to 50,000. According to the Joshua Project, about 4 percent of them identify as Christian, which makes them one of the most unreached communities in a country where roughly 85 percent of people claim the Christian faith.

Another student, Wanjiku Maina, also had trouble meeting Chinese people, even when she went looking for them on college campuses. In 2016, Maina had written in a notebook, I would like to reach out to Asians, and use language teaching as a platform. At the time, she was doing a year-long internship with the Mission Campaign Network, a local organization that mobilizes Africans, and she had had her heart set on becoming a missionary in Vietnam. But during one of her classes, a presenter suggested there were unreached people in Kenya, maybe even among her neighbors.

That switched Maina’s perspective. She started praying, “God, is Vietnam something you placed in my heart? Or maybe I just want to go abroad?”

Meanwhile, she was reading the news about China’s mega construction projects in Africa and was amazed to see Chinese companies operating, of all places, in her grandmother’s rural village, building a dam. She saw memes about Chinese people too. Dogs are disappearing, one joke went, implying that they eat canines. Maina didn’t pay those stereotypes any mind. Her prayers turned toward her country’s Chinese community.

It didn’t make sense to Maina and Njuguna that they should feel a special affection for Chinese people. They didn’t know the language or the culture. They didn’t have a single Chinese confidant. Many Kenyans do business with Chinese companies and labor in their factories, but the two communities rarely mingle. At work and in public, they eat separate meals at separate tables. It’s a widely accepted fact, I was told when I visited Kenya in 2023, that Kenyans and Chinese are not friends.

Photograph by KC Cheng for Christianity Today

Kenya’s growing Chinese immigrant population ranges from an estimated 20,000 to 50,000.

By many estimates, China has exported more than a million of its citizens to the African continent—traders, managers, farmers, doctors, and restaurateurs who are spread from Mozambique to Senegal to Liberia. If you want to make big money fast, the thinking in China goes, set sail to Africa.

China has touted itself and its people as better partners for Africa than paternalistic Westerners and their one-way charity. Whereas Americans and Europeans sought to conquer and ravage Africa, the Chinese government claims, it seeks “partnership” and “cooperation” based on “equality and mutual benefit.”

Still, many Africans, remembering the colonial days, have watched the influx of fortune-seekers with unease. The Asian superpower clearly wields the upper hand, as many African nations have become deeply indebted to China. (Kenya now spends more than half of its national revenue on debt, much of it owed to China.) Since President Xi Jinping launched his ambitious Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, financing and building massive infrastructure projects across the globe, China has expanded its presence in almost every country in Africa.

Though Kenya’s Chinese community is small, China’s influence in Kenya is everywhere. Kenya was an early participant in the Belt and Road Initiative. A Chinese company built the controversial Mombasa–Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway, which cost $4.7 billion and is losing money, and the $764 million Nairobi Expressway, which opened in May 2022 and stands almost empty because most locals cannot afford the tolls.

The Chinese embassy in Kenya boasts that the more than 400 Chinese businesses operating in the country have provided 130,000 jobs for locals. But that hasn’t quelled local fears of unfair competition from Chinese migrants who arrive with more capital and better import networks. Kenyans complain that Chinese employers only hire them for menial jobs and pay them a fraction of what they pay Chinese workers for the same roles.

In March of 2023, hundreds of Kenyan traders marched in Nairobi, carrying signs calling for the government to “Stop China Invasion!” and chanting “Chinese must go!” Such fears and resentment have mixed with reports of racist behavior by Chinese employees that have gone viral online.

And yet, amid such fraught international and social dynamics, there’s Njuguna, whose eyes light up when he hears Chinese being spoken. “I can’t help it,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Oooh! I can’t wait to go talk to them.’”

And although both communities tend to self-segregate, there’s Maina, who now spends more time with Chinese than with Kenyans. Five years ago, she didn’t eat seafood. Now she can pick apart a whole gingery steamed fish with chopsticks and suck the pink flesh from a whiskery, wok-fried shrimp.

Wayne and Irene, an ethnic-Chinese missionary couple from Malaysia, call Njuguna and Maina “black pearls.”

“Pearls are precious, but black pearls are even rarer,” Irene said, a reference not to the Kenyans’ skin color but to the valuable gemstone. Njuguna and Maina “are the kind of black pearls that you can’t just find in any churches.”

They should know. Wayne and Irene, who asked that only their first names be used to protect their ministry from interference by the Chinese government, had been trying to get Kenyan Christians to engage with Chinese immigrants since the couple moved to Nairobi in 2014.

In February 2016, they founded International Fellowship, a multicultural community that offers Chinese ministry training and bilingual Sunday services and that they hoped would be a model for other Kenyan churches. To promote it, they visited a dozen churches and helped organize 80 hours of training on Chinese language and culture. People showed up, curious. But when it came time to commit, “they disappeared,” Irene said.

Once, after Wayne led a seminar at a church, a young man approached him and said, “Wow, I never once thought that the Chinese might need the gospel too!”

Wayne asked him why not. The man replied, “Because the Chinese are rich! They make our watches, computers, and headphones.”

“The idea of missions is still trapped in the paradigm of from the rich to the poor, from urban to village, the haves to the have-nots,” Wayne said. Many locals see the Chinese community in Africa as better educated and more powerful, perhaps even more “blessed.”

Adding to the cultural gulf is the fact that many Chinese expats don’t plan to stay in Kenya permanently. They work long hours, often including weekends. One middle-aged hot pot restaurant owner from Fujian Province told me that he and his wife work seven days a week, from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. When I asked if they interact with any locals, he shrugged. “We have no time outside of work,” he said, adding they hoped eventually to go back to China. Why make friends?

Photograph by KC Cheng for Christianity Today

Daive Njuguna

In August 2018, Maina visited International Fellowship’s Sunday service. The 25-year-old was late, so she slipped into a seat at the back.

Maina, who is quiet and has a kind face, had been looking for ways to meet Chinese people when someone told her about the fellowship. About 30 Kenyans and Chinese filled the tiny, warm room; Maina observed them in awe.

At the end of the service, a Chinese woman stood to give her testimony in Mandarin, while Wayne interpreted in English. The woman said she was returning to China soon, and she thanked the congregation for all their care and love—life in Kenya would have been so lonely without them, she said.

At the time, Maina had been meditating on Psalm 146:9: “The Lord watches over the foreigner and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked.” As she looked around at the Chinese worshipers, she saw not the privilege that other Kenyans saw, but vulnerability and isolation. Maina sensed God whispering to her, “Yes, I’ve been watching over them. I’ve been taking care of them.”

After that first Sunday service, Maina joined International Fellowship’s prayer meetings, where a small team gathered every Thursday morning at a Chinese family’s house. This is it, Maina thought, her excitement growing. This is home.

The following year, when Wayne and Irene visited a large church to promote International Fellowship, Njuguna was in the audience. The lanky 23-year-old with aviator glasses felt his heart flutter as he listened to the presentation. Afterward, he beelined to the missionaries. “I also want to reach out to the Chinese!” he said. “I did not know there were people who did this.”

And just like that, Wayne and Irene had found their two black pearls. “God called them,” Irene said. “It had nothing to do with us.”

At 4 foot 7, Maina is so petite that she rolls up the bottom of her jeans. She can fade into the background—until she opens her mouth and speaks fluent Mandarin, perfectly hitting every intonation.

When Maina first told her parents she wanted to be a full-time missionary to Chinese people, they were displeased. Her father is a pastor, her mother an elder and Sunday school teacher. They had approved of their daughter’s involvement in ministry during university. But when Maina began talking about becoming a missionary to Vietnam, they grew alarmed. All they knew about Vietnam was the bloody American war movies. And what about getting a real job? Their daughter was smart, with a degree in linguistics. Why throw all that away? “Don’t go,” they begged her.

And then, all of a sudden, Maina stopped talking about Vietnam and began talking instead about becoming a missionary to Kenya’s Chinese community.

It filled her parents with new anxieties. How was she going to raise funds to support herself as a missionary in Kenya? They worried she would fall into “a life of begging.”

But she was hooked from her first encounter with International Fellowship. “I want to be part of this,” Maina resolved that day.

To learn Mandarin, she attended a training center called Discovery Chinese Cultural Center, run by a Christian Kenyan woman who partners with International Fellowship. Maina began there in 2019 and studied for two years, then turned to self-study. As her parents feared, she struggled with finances. The center’s director offered her extensions on her tuition payments.

Maina also began teaching English to a group of Chinese women every Tuesday. It was more social club than English class. Maina would instruct them on basic vocabulary words—“This is a bus. This is a car.”—and the women followed along, repeating “bus” and “car” for a few minutes before dissolving into giggles and reverting to Mandarin chatter.

That didn’t bother Maina. It was to her gain, listening to their melodious Chinese, studying their facial expressions and the ways their personalities bloomed when they could freely express themselves. She doesn’t know if these women learned any English, but her own Mandarin improved. Wayne says Maina is the best non-native speaker he’s met in Kenya.

Friends of friends began hiring Maina for private tutoring. Then Chinese businessmen hired her to teach them English and Swahili. Without any advertising, she amassed enough students to rent a tiny tutoring space in Nairobi and support herself.

Sometimes, Maina flips back to her old notebook in which, seven years ago, she had journaled about her desire to reach Asians and teach. “God is good,” she said.

Her parents no longer ask when she’s going to find a job. They see her working. And they see God working.

Photograph by KC Cheng for Christianity Today

Wanjiku Maina

In June 2023, Maina was hired by three Chinese visitors working for a company that sells stonecutting machines. She interpreted for them at a trade show. She accompanied them on a safari ride where they fed the giraffes. And toward the end of the trip, they stopped by a factory that uses the company’s machinery.

The factory boss, an agitated Indian man, complained that the machines weren’t working properly and demanded that the Chinese team fix the problem. But neither party could understand each other, so Maina stood in the middle, trying to translate difficult technical words between English and Mandarin while everyone’s patience wore thin.

Meanwhile, the Kenyans who worked directly with the machines told Maina in Swahili that their boss was confusing the machine with another model. “We’ve been telling him this,” they told her. “But he refuses to listen to us.”

Maina felt the misunderstanding could have been resolved in ten minutes, but it took her hours to explain the mistake to the boss and the Chinese team. It was like “two bulls fighting,” she recalled, “and the Kenyans are the grass. The Chinese and the Indian are up here”—she raised a hand up to her head, then lowered it to her belly—“and the Kenyans are down there.”

What Maina and Njuguna do as missionaries seems simple: They meet Chinese people, they befriend them, they look for ways to share the gospel. It is 101-level relational evangelism, sometimes called incarnation evangelism or friendship evangelism. But how do you befriend someone who might not see you as an equal?

Njuguna remembers the dirty expressions he received when he visited Chinese homes. Not realizing he could understand them, his hosts would mutter, “Zhe ge ren shi shenme?” What’s up with this person? Some told him to stay outside. Once, Njuguna accompanied some Chinese friends to a Chinese home for a meal, and someone barked in Mandarin, “Don’t give him our utensils!” Njuguna’s friends had to borrow a plate and spoon for him from neighbors.

But Kenyans also discriminate against Chinese. Kenyan officials are known to target Chinese immigrants and harass them for bribes. Wayne says he regularly gets stopped and fined by police for offenses such as having a dirty license plate.

When Maina and Njuguna intentionally break those kinds of barriers to befriend people, that’s the gospel coming alive, Wayne said. “We believe that the gospel brings reconciliation. The Chinese and the Kenyans are not friends. But we believe the possibility of friendship develops in Jesus Christ.”

In 2021, a Chinese family that attended International Fellowship invited Njuguna to move and live with them in Eldoret, a town in western Kenya. They hired Njuguna to help manage their sheet metal factory.

At times, relations were strained. The family talked to him in a commanding tone and expected him to work on holidays. “They treated me as if I were a tool,” Njuguna said. He didn’t tell them they paid him too little to treat him that way. Instead, he told them, “Guys, I’m your friend. I’m here to help you and work with you. But you can’t use me like I’m a fork.”

He held his ground, but he also empathized with the Chinese family. They had struggled since arriving in Kenya. The husband had been jailed for 10 hours over some purported issues with his immigration paperwork. (The issue was resolved after he paid them.) A landlord had cheated them out of almost $5,000.

“So by the time I met this family, there was a lot of hurt,” Njuguna recalled. “They didn’t trust anyone. Within Chinese circles, they all say the same thing: Don’t trust the Kenyans.” Though the family was friendly to Njuguna, he sensed an underlying tension. He felt that Chinese people tend to treat relationships as transactional. But what if a Kenyan were to display the unmerited grace that Christ modeled on the cross and love without expecting anything in return?

Njuguna offered to help the family recover the $5,000 from the landlord. They were wary—they didn’t want more trouble—but Njuguna insisted. “Who says you can’t get justice just because this isn’t your country?” He called a lawyer, and eventually the family got their money back.

That was one barrier broken down.

The second crumbled inside their home. The family’s then eight-year-old son, Jason, had been diagnosed with ADHD. When his behavior turned unruly, his parents beat him. They were so busy with work that they barely noticed Jason hanging out with kids who spewed profanity and watched violent television shows. But Njuguna had bonded with Jason—who called the Kenyan man shushu, or uncle. “Let me take over the disciplining,” Njuguna told the exhausted parents. They consented.

Njuguna disciplined Jason the way his mother disciplined him: with love and prayer. He set firm boundaries and explained the reasons for any consequences. He prayed with him after each discipline session. “I saw him like he’s my son,” Njuguna said.

After more than a year in Eldoret, Njuguna felt convicted to return to Nairobi to serve as a full-time missionary among the Chinese community. His father, a pastor himself, tried to dissuade him. So many young Kenyans are hungry for secure jobs like his in Eldoret, he told Njuguna. Maybe God had provided it for a reason.

“I feel like God is calling me to do this,” Njuguna said.

His mother told him, “Whatever God is calling you to do, do it.”

Photograph by KC Cheng for Christianity Today

Kenyans and Chinese alike frequent the restaurants in Kenya’s Chinatowns.

Njuguna plays the guitar. In March 2023, two months after he returned to Nairobi, a Chinese restaurant hired him to perform live music on Saturday nights. Njuguna saw it as an exciting outreach opportunity. He made some phone calls to talented friends, including a vocalist who could sing Chinese pop songs.

Every weekend, at a courtyard next to an outdoor grill piled with caramelizing meat skewers, they played traditional Chinese folk songs and Christian hymns. The restaurant patrons were thrilled. They recorded with cell phones, tipped generously, and made offers to hire the band for other gigs.

Once, after the group played a Swahili hymn about prayer, a man approached with his hand on his heart. “That song!” he exclaimed in Mandarin. “It touches me. Can you play it again?”

But Njuguna clashed with his band members. Some of them wanted to draw bigger crowds by playing popular songs with sexual content that Njuguna felt was inappropriate.

“It would be like preaching water and drinking wine,” Njuguna said, quoting a common Kenyan saying. Within six months, Njuguna shut the band down. It was clear his friends saw the music ministry as a moneymaking gig, and if they were going to be in constant conflict, it was better to end it.

“It’s not easy,” Njuguna told me. “Finding that one person with the same desire so we can work together is so hard.”

After being the recipient of foreign aid and missions for so long, many Africans think “mission work is for foreigners,” he said. A local missionary who feels called to reach the Chinese must compete for interest in Kenyan churches already pulled in many directions by many needs.

For two years, Njuguna had been pestering his pastors about how they could reach the Chinese community. He interned at Mamlaka Hill Chapel, a nondenominational church with more than 1,000 members and a main campus near the University of Nairobi, home to the Chinese government’s first Confucius Institute in Africa. Most of the institute teachers lived in a gated apartment complex a mere five-minute walk from the church.

Njuguna told pastors: People from one of the least religious countries in the world flew 5,000 miles to live a stone’s throw from a church whose mission statement is “to build godly communities that will impact the nations for Christ.” Could the church not see what a providential opportunity this was?

On a Sunday afternoon, I sat in a pastor’s office with Njuguna and several other Mamlaka leaders, lunching on pilaf and chicken drumsticks.

It’s not that there’s no interest in cross-cultural missions, senior pastor Samuel Ithiga told me. Mamlaka had recently sent a team of 27 Kenyans to Germany and another couple to New Zealand. “Never thought of the Chinese, though.”

“Why not?” I asked. The Chinese community was at least a decade old, wasn’t it?

The pastors nodded. Many of their members do business with the Chinese. One pastor lives on Ngong Road, home to several Chinatowns. In fact, he said, he’s often awakened in the night by drunk Chinese men singing loud karaoke next door. They don’t even have the decency to sing well, he joked. Ithiga said he is on a soccer team with a friendly Chinese man who isn’t a Christian and is hungry for friends.

“The Chinese are a very unique ministry,” said assistant bishop Richard Munala. “We want the church to [reach Chinese people]. But we need someone who can teach us how.”

“The only thing I know about the Chinese is kung fu movies,” interjected one pastor. Everyone laughed.

“It’s still very new to us,” Ithiga said. “It needs a champion, somebody who sort of helps the rest of us see, Oh look! There’s an opportunity here.”

When Njuguna first started talking about his heart for Chinese people, the pastors thought, “Wow, good for you,” Ithiga recalled. “But then he kept coming to us and telling us, ‘I’m not taking any jobs. God is telling me to be more serious about this.’ Then it was like, whoa. It’s getting scary,” Ithiga joked. “What are you doing? Go get yourself a job!”

Then Njuguna brought his friends from International Fellowship. The pastors took Njuguna’s vision more seriously when they saw that he had partners behind him, people like Wayne and Irene and Maina. It was a “no-brainer” after that, Ithiga said. Mamlaka Hill Chapel commissioned Njuguna as their full-time missionary to the Chinese community.

Photograph by KC Cheng for Christianity Today

Chinese immigrant restaurant owners frequently employ local Kenyans.

On July 9, 2023, the morning of his commissioning service, Njuguna knew exactly what he was going to wear.

About five years ago, when he was praying for his Chinese neighbors, he spotted a shirt at a secondhand market. It was a black pullover tunic, with a western collar, long fitted sleeves, and a hem that reached down to his knees. It wasn’t quite a Kenyan kanzu, nor was it an Indian kurta, but it vaguely reminded him of a changshan, a long robe worn by men in China in the early 1900s. So he bought it.

Since then, Njuguna has learned that people don’t wear black changshans, as they’re typically burial attire. But on commission day, Njuguna resurrected the shirt from his closet. It seemed fitting that he should wear it that morning as a symbol of his love for the Chinese community.

During the service, Ithiga announced that Mamlaka Hill Chapel would be pursuing a new mission field. “What God is doing in our times is he’s sending the Chinese people our way, so that we may create friendship, create understanding with them, and hopefully get to share our faith,” he told the church. “And God has raised a Moses from our midst.”

Njuguna walked up to the stage with a nervous grin.

“It’s not like you’ve ever gone to China,” Ithiga said to Njuguna, launching an onstage exchange. So how did he develop a heart for Chinese people?

But he had been to China, Njuguna replied. “I’ve gone to Chinatown, China City in Kilimani . . .” He listed all the bustling Chinese hubs in Nairobi, and the congregation chortled. Everyone knew these places, even if few had set foot in them.

“A mark of a great church is a church that’s fulfilling the Great Commission,” Munala said as he got ready to anoint Njuguna. God has raised Njuguna as their “champion” to reach out to Chinese communities in Kenya, “not only so we can feel good that we have someone out there doing mission work to the Chinese, but he will be the door for us—all of you, you and I”—he pointed with his Bible at the congregation and to himself—“to do ministry to the Chinese.”

Then the pastor dipped his finger in oil, drew a cross over Njuguna’s forehead, and prayed over him.

As Njuguna knelt, face solemn, his parents stood beside him, also somber. His father, a man of few words, didn’t say much. His mother spoke for him when she told her son, “We are so proud of you.”

Standing onstage too was the entire core team from International Fellowship, representing six different countries: Malaysia, China, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, and Kenya. Wayne and Irene beamed. Njuguna had waited two years for his church to embrace his mission, persevering when people told him he should give up.

“What a beautiful picture,” Ithiga marveled, looking at the people onstage. “People from different nations, standing right here saying, ‘We want to reach the Chinese for the kingdom of God.’ And I love how this will be like at the end of the age when we are standing there, people from every tongue and nation, praising the nation of the Lord.”

Then he added, “And we, Kenya, will not be left behind.”

Sophia Lee is global staff writer at CT.

This article appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Called to Kenya's Chinatowns".

- More from Sophia Lee

Ideas

Calling Is More Than Your Job

Steven Zhou

We often conflate our vocation with God’s purpose for our lives. Is that biblical?

Illustration by Simone Noronha

When Christians talk about work, much of the conversation involves discerning God’s plan for their lives. As someone who graduated from a Christian university, I find that faith-based schools and churches often ask young adults to ponder questions like “What is God’s will for your career?”

Yes, these questions are important—discerning one’s calling to a particular vocational path and pursuing it wholeheartedly can lead to a sense of fulfillment and meaning in one’s work. Presumably, it’s also part of the process of doing the good things God prepares for us in advance (Eph. 2:10). But too often when we discern a vocational calling, we assume that all it takes to fulfill it is deciphering God’s plan and finding a job that fits in that.

This assumption is misleading at best, perhaps even harmful. Why? Consider some common issues I’ve come across in my research:

A young college graduate sees music as her calling. After years of playing at one small pay-as-you-go bar venue after another, with no long-term sustainable employment in sight, she gives up. She lands a stable job managing a restaurant. But to her, the work feels subpar, like a waste of her God-given talents. Her elusive big break in music was supposed to have led to the right career.

Another young adult feels called to work with troubled youth, but his parents insist he take a stable job to pay off his student debts. As he walks into the office each morning, he feels like he’s selling out rather than doing what God had so clearly told him to do.

Or think of a dedicated family of missionaries. After experiencing a series of visa challenges outside their control, they return to the United States, feeling like they failed God and their mission.

You too may have experienced some of the initial joys of wholeheartedly pursuing your calling, perhaps even found a job that fulfilled it perfectly. But at times, a calling—especially one left unfulfilled—somehow leads to feelings of burnout, stress, failure, and dissatisfaction.

If vocational calling is such a good and noble thing to pursue, why does it sometimes—often, even—lead to so much trouble?

I believe our understanding of vocational calling is due for an update—one that disentangles it from modern views of career success and broadens our understanding of work and time. If we do this, we might find ourselves with a healthier approach to discerning and pursuing our callings.

In my PhD studies on vocational psychology, I have seen decades of research on the notion of calling and its positive effects. Much of it points to a correlation between a sense of calling and feelings of satisfaction, efficacy, and meaningfulness. Calling can even improve career performance.

But it’s not always such a rosy picture. Academic research has begun to highlight a “dark side” of pursuing a calling.

When we don’t speak accurately about vocational calling, we tend to make false inferences, particularly about necessity and control over the outcome. We often assume that we must identify a vocational calling, or that once we’ve identified a calling, we must find a job that fulfills it.

This is not always true. Christians can glorify God and can listen to his call in other aspects of their lives without having identified a specific vocational calling.

We should not tell each other that discerning a calling—let alone fulfilling it—is a requirement for godliness. Instead, we can emphasize that it is a desirable, valuable goal that depends on the right circumstances. It is more like home ownership (a nice-to-have) than hospitality (a Christian virtue).

Even if someone has identified a calling, there simply may not be enough job opportunities in the desired vocation, or another outside force may keep that person from entering or staying in that field, regardless of how hard he or she tries. This can lead to a sense of overwhelming pressure from unreasonable expectations for a career.

Many people experience regret, stress, or disappointment when they recognize a calling but it goes unfulfilled. In a study of 378 American faculty members, those who felt their calling was unfulfilled by their present job reported worse life, job, and health outcomes than those who did not feel they had a calling at all. The researchers concluded that “having a calling is a benefit only if it is met, but can be a detriment when it is not as compared to having no calling at all.”

Another study surveyed 450 musicians over the course of 11 years and found that those who strongly felt a calling to music were likelier to pursue music professionally. This was despite, ironically, “an intriguing pattern in which the experience of stronger early callings led to greater perceived ability that was not reflected in greater actual ability.” In other words, their sense of calling didn’t align with their level of giftedness.

While trying to break into the field they believe they ought to be in, people may find themselves in, as some researchers put it, “unpleasant states of regret over forgone fulfillment of their unanswered callings and stress due to difficulties in pursuing their unanswered callings.”

What’s more, even when people do find jobs that fulfill their calling, they are often susceptible to work behaviors that lead to burnout and poor work-life balance.

One of the earliest reports of the dark side of vocational calling came from a study focused on US zookeepers in 2009. The researchers found that zookeepers with a strong sense of calling benefited from broader meaningfulness and significance in their work but also suffered by sacrificing pay, time, and comfort. In her 2023 study on Lutheran educators, Newberry College professor Krista E. Hughes called this a “passion tax” that has become “alarmingly high.”

Allowing our sense of calling to trump other real needs seems to be a particularly slippery slope when one’s calling is to low-income, high-
workload, high-stress occupations with few work-life boundaries, such as pastoral work. It’s not uncommon to hear of pastors willingly working long hours, never asking for a fair raise, and ultimately burning out and leaving ministry.

I do want to encourage everyone, both young and old, to think carefully about what they believe God has called them do. We can pray, “Show me your ways, Lord, teach me your paths” (Ps. 25:4). We can ask God to “teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” and to “establish the work of our hands” (Ps. 90:12, 17). We know that God invites us to participate in his will on earth and in his kingdom, and we ask to be equipped in ways that allow us to perform his will (Heb. 13:20–21).

My colleagues and I published a research paper last year advocating for a new conceptualization of calling. I believe it is especially important for Christians in the US.

The first step may be to disentangle our understanding of calling from modern views of career success. It seems that when we say a given job is our calling, we layer onto it the additional expectation that we ought to “succeed” in that job. Perhaps not financially—especially if a calling is to ministry—but at least in other ways, we often look to measures of success as validation that we are fulfilling our calling. Whether it’s a promotion, cultural influence, or church growth, we see these as evidence that we are doing God’s will effectively, and we expect to see them if we are truly in a role we were called to.

To be clear, signs of success are not bad. But they can be easily twisted into idols that turn noble objectives into pride, unreasonable expectations, and a focus on the world rather than on God. John Piper writes in his book A Hunger for God, “The greatest adversary of love to God is not his enemies but his gifts. … For when these replace an appetite for God himself, the idolatry is scarcely recognizable, and almost incurable.”

Everyone’s journey of discerning and pursuing a calling looks different and has different outcomes. Realizing this releases us from a schema of what a “fulfilled calling” looks like in our careers, and it allows us to explore, in faith, what God has in store for us.

From here, we need to broaden our understanding of work as well as calling. “Work” can encompass far more than just paid employment. The scope of our calling might be fulfilled not by a single narrowly defined job but by a broad spectrum of activities that may or may not take place in the domain of paid employment.

Perhaps your calling is to be a writer. That doesn’t mean you need to be a professional author whose sole income comes from successful book releases. It could be fulfilled in the short stories you write for your church’s educational resources or in the occasional book you release to bless a handful of readers.

Your primary employment and calling can be pursued simultaneously if they’re not the same. Look at Paul, who was directly called by God on the road to Damascus to serve as a catalyst to the early church’s growth (Acts 9). He also seems to have continued his day job as a tentmaker, a role he used to both support himself and further the kingdom of God through his business (Acts 18:2–3; 1 Thess. 2:9).

We also need to broaden our understanding of the time frame of a calling. When we start to pursue God’s will for our lives through a calling, we seem to assume it is an immediate pursuit. But callings may in reality take time to come to fruition. That is, we might discern God’s calling early on in life, but the path he has set for us could take us through any number of twists and turns for many years before we find an occupation that fulfills our calling.

These years shouldn’t be thought of as distractions or wasted time. They are important stepping stones that God is using to shape and form us in preparation for the future. Take, for example, Joseph’s dreams for his future, first reported in Genesis 37. They were not fulfilled until years later—after countless trials and adversities.

Similarly, after finding work that fulfills our calling, we need to remember that it doesn’t last forever. Some callings may last only a few years, while others may last a lifetime. When your work changes due to factors such as a layoff, your family’s needs, or new technology, it doesn’t mean that you’ve lost your calling. Perhaps you’ve fulfilled this vocational calling, and God is prompting you toward a new calling or a temporary break.

The field of career counseling has already been shifting its approach to the idea of calling. Previously, some counselors were reluctant to help students discern a calling, believing that it could backfire if the students’ circumstances were leading toward a job that lay outside the perceived calling. Then, one 2020 study suggested that career counselors can help young people discern a calling without worrying that their lives will be negatively affected if they don’t pursue it.

The benefits of trying to identify a young person’s calling were especially clear when counselors encouraged individuals to be flexible in what their calling and occupation could look like. This can also mitigate adverse effects such as burnout, poor work-life balance, and unhealthy stress.

But there is still reason for caution. One study of amateur musicians pointed out a notable concern—that those with a stronger sense of calling tended to be more willing to ignore career-related advice from a trusted mentor if it was at odds with their perceived professional calling.

Taken together, these factors lead me to conclude that we must invest in more career counseling studies and resources.

Christians need to discern and pursue vocational callings. However, doing so with a focus on the broader purpose of serving in God’s kingdom may change how we perceive calling—and increase our delight in the ways God has called us into his kingdom in all aspects of our lives, beyond just employment. Perhaps some better questions we should be asking are:

Can my calling be fulfilled only by a specific, full-time job?

Is a job that aligns with my calling available to me now, or might I have to wait?

Am I assuming that my calling will last for all my working years, or might my calling change over time?

For all of us seeking where we can best use the gifts God has given us, I say: Actively pray for and seek wise counsel about calling, knowing that your career and your calling are not one and the same. Fulfillment may be found in the most unlikely of places.

Steven Zhou has a PhD in organizational psychology from George Mason University, where he now teaches as an adjunct faculty member while serving as director of operations for his church.

This article appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Calling’s Dark Side".

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Theology

Some of Christianity’s Biggest Skeptics Are Becoming Vocal Converts

Nathan Guy

These “New Christians” are the result of apologetic work spanning decades. But is their faith merely intellectual?

Depicted left to right: A. N. Wilson, Tom Holland, Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Illustration by Jan Robert Dünnweller

A half century ago, Christianity Today printed an editorial titled “The New Christians,” which followed a movement known as the Jesus Revolution. These young “counter-culture converts,” as the article dubbed them, held emotionally charged notions of the Christian experience.

Yet despite the positive vibes associated with this emerging band of new believers, the editorial noted that the chief criticism leveled against them was that they seemed to exhibit a “super-subjective trust” and lacked a “substantial apologetic.” This was cause for concern, it was felt, since the Christian faith required “cognitive knowledge” to ground one’s “subjective experience.”

Fast forward 50 years, and a new religious movement seems to be underway, perhaps just as offbeat as the Jesus People of the 1970s. I am talking about the growing number of “intellectual Christians”—people whose turn to faith is tethered far more to cognitive knowledge than to subjective experience.
The general cultural trend on the ground is still shifting away from Christianity—most easily recognized by the exponential rise of the “nones.” But a curious trend is taking place among the elite, as a growing number of high-profile thought leaders and public figures are repudiating their antireligious paradigms in favor of the Christian framework.

Consider, for example, A. N. Wilson, an Oxford graduate and former classmate of Richard Dawkins who had developed a reputation as a cerebral writer with a bone to pick with believers. The self-described atheist shared his misgivings in his 1991 book Against Religion: Why We Should Try to Live Without It. But in 2009, Wilson shocked his friends and colleagues by penning a New Statesman article titled “Why I believe again.” Some may try to live without religion, Wilson declared, but he could not.

A noted author and researcher, Wilson had read biographies of people who spent their lives serving the poor and outcasts because of their faith. “I found it impossible not to realise that all life, all being, derives from God,” he wrote. This reminded him, he said, “of all the human qualities that have to be denied if you embrace the bleak, muddled creed of a materialist atheist.”

“Human beings are very much more than collections of meat,” he concluded. Our humanity toward one another, along with the languages of love and music, convinced Wilson “that we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.”

Nearly a decade later came Tom Holland, an award-winning British author and ancient Greek and Roman historian. At some point in his studies, Holland recognized the difference in values held by the ancient world compared to those he held instinctively. He realized Christianity is the reason we take for granted that it is better to bear suffering than to cause it—and why we assume all human life is equal in value.

As an avowed atheist throughout his adult life, Holland shocked fellow academics in 2016 when he too penned an article in the New Statesman titled “Why I was wrong about Christianity.” And while he may not yet consider himself a believer in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, he confessed he has lost faith in the secular narrative, returned to church, and “surrendered to the truth” of the stories in Scripture (such as the Exodus), whether they are ultimately historical or mythical.

When it came to his morals and ethics, Holland said, he learned to accept he was “thoroughly and proudly Christian”—a realization he boldly underscored in a later interview with British historian Dan Snow: “I have come to the conclusion that, essentially, I am Christian.”

Former New Atheist thinker Ayaan Hirsi Ali made a similar turn just last year. As a research fellow at Stanford University and a Muslim, Ali was once described by Christopher Hitchens as “the most important public intellectual probably to come out of Africa.” But in 2023, she professed in her essay “Why I am now a Christian” (apparently a play on Bertrand Russell’s famous 1927 essay) that her desire and search for a unifying basis for belief in the humanitarian values of life, equality, freedom, and dignity ultimately led her to the Christian faith.

“The only credible answer,” Ali said, “lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.” She appreciated not only its focus on the intellectual status of humanity but also its “compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.” In answer to those looking for meaning and purpose in their lives, Ali was compelled to admit that “Christianity has it all.”

Such intellectual conversion stories are not new. My own doctoral supervisor at Cambridge—Janet Martin Soskice—converted in college precisely because of Christianity’s intellectual satisfaction. Philosopher Edward Feser returned to the Catholicism of his youth for the same reason. But this trend seems to have increased exponentially in recent years, with a growing number of secular intellectuals making similar declarations.

What does this phenomenon reveal about the changing cultural climate in the past 15 years? I believe it signals a significant pendulum swing—due in part to apologetic groundwork laid by previous generations.

In the early part of the 20th century, philosophy professors began announcing that the problem of evil was a final death knell for an antiquated Christian religion. The problem of pain and suffering—including because of “man’s inhumanity to man”—simply could not be accounted for under the reign of an all-powerful and all-loving God.

Instead, these academics argued, philosophy could offer an anthropocentric ethic that did not require appealing to the heavens. Epicurus first made this argument; David Hume systematized and popularized it; and professors told their students it was a settled conclusion.

Scholars began to argue that religion was merely a tool for repression and oppression—as many wars in history could attest—and that the morality of secular humanism could stand independent of such constraints. They promoted a hopeful idealism that if we could just give libertarian freedom full authoritative power, all would be well in the world.

By the late ’60s and early ’70s—with those decades’ extreme focus on individualism, sexual freedom, and social liberation—the search for some replacement of religion (usually in politics) was in full swing. And what did this perspective pass on to the next generation? Those growing up in the ’80s and ’90s found their answer in the nihilism of Seinfeld and classroom debates about whether the Nuremberg trials would have occurred if they were held in our own time. And the “death of God” movement—along with its secular moral standard—now roamed outside the halls of academia and entered the public square.

But a funny thing happened on the road to nihilism. At many intellectual institutions, the wind had already begun to blow in the opposite direction. In the late 1960s, Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga provided his classic free-will defense for the problem of evil, and in the late ’70s, Richard Swinburne began his trilogy on the philosophy of theism.

Before 1970, generations of philosophy students were fully expected to graduate from departments headed by atheists where belief in God was conspicuously absent. Yet a decade later, Time ran a story suggesting a quiet philosophical coup had taken place: Theistic arguments for God were making a modern comeback, and reports of God’s death turned out to be greatly exaggerated.

It seems many of the bright philosophers graduating from eminent programs and taking positions in prominent universities were—shockingly—theists. And many of them were Christians, bringing their intellectual powers to bear on the apologetic front. These scholars were slowly making inroads among the intelligentsia, and their influence was trickling down into the public square.

Soon, Christian philosophers were not only well-respected academics in their field but chairs of their departments. The early members of this class of faith-led scholars gave way to later members who carried the banner even further—such that by the 2000s, Christian philosophy of religion had become a powerful force to be reckoned with in the academy.

All of this was either noted or anticipated nearly a half century ago, and it was only a matter of time before we would begin to see the corresponding cracks in secular philosophy emerge. A time, for example, like now.

What exactly is happening in the realm of philosophy today? At an institutional level, atheism has long been showing signs of wear, as the death of the New Atheism movement attests. And for those like Wilson, Holland, and Ali, the foundation of secular humanism itself seems to be crumbling.

It was always a shaky foundation to begin with, both in theory and in practice, but it further fractured as generations of atheists and agnostics awaited the advent of a humanist idealism that never materialized. Instead, the problems intrinsic to a reductionist, naturalistic, materialistic outlook began attracting more and more attention. And now, even prominent skeptics are weighing secularism in the balance and finding it wanting.

The burning question throughout most of my academic research has been centered on the nature of human rights: What makes humans so special, and why should we respect values like freedom and equality?

The answer, I believe, is found in the theological roots of human dignity and its ramifications for Western culture. Our charters claim to value all people as free and equal, yet we have often neglected the deeper spiritual truths behind these claims.

Consider the fundamental understanding of human rights adopted by much of the developed world, which carries vast ethical implications for our social and legal systems. One monumental claim of these new Christians is that desirable social values—such as love for neighbor, religious toleration, and human flourishing—have no credible standing without an objective moral foundation. The Christian understanding of humanity’s relationship to God as both creator and moral lawgiver provides such a premise.

In my own research, I found a striking similarity in the arguments of two seemingly odd bedfellows—John Locke and Peter Singer. Singer, an atheistic utilitarian, has been pushing the logic of scientific naturalism to its ultimate conclusion. He argues there is no such thing as an inherent privileged set of rights or dignity that applies exclusively to human beings. After all, humans differ from other animals only by degree, and so ethics for nonhuman creatures must be placed on equal or even superior footing to some members of our own species.

Three centuries earlier, Christian philosopher and legal theorist John Locke argued for a moral community of equals—involving those “of the same species and rank”—though he was quick to say our categories are often arbitrary and admit exceptions.

Locke and Singer both agree that without appealing to transcendence there simply is no objective standard for human dignity and equality. It is for this reason Locke made his philosophical appeal from a Christian starting point. This allowed him to acknowledge the distinct value of human life in a way Singer could not.

Still, many have tried to maintain the Christian concept of human rights apart from its religious foundation. For instance, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—adopted by the United Nations in 1948—reads that all humans are “born free and equal in dignity and rights.” Yet the charter provides not one syllable of defense for why we should believe such a statement is true.

The same can be said of many other organizational charters and humanitarian statements that appeal to a shared moral instinct yet fail to ground that instinct in reasoned argument. The ones that do construct a philosophical foundation have little choice but to appeal to a transcendent source for morality: a divine Creator who teaches us to value humans as he does.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the Declaration of Independence asserts, “that all men are . . . equal.” This sentence would sit alongside most modern declarations with little contradiction. But a very important word was supplied by an earlier generation out of moral necessity: created. Human beings are “endowed by their Creator” with certain rights that only by virtue of them being granted by the Creator can be considered “unalienable,” including the rights to life and liberty.

Writing in 1991, Louis Pojman claimed that by upholding human dignity as a modern humanitarian value, “we are living off the borrowed interest of a religious metaphysic.” More recently, Benjamin Vincent argued this is still true for our generation. Today, postmodernist relativism is being replaced with metamodernism’s “new ethical absolutism”—which cherry-picks moral principles apart from their larger ideological foundations.

As our recent intellectual converts bear witness, the concepts of equality and justice used to advance various social causes in the ’60s, ’70s, and today
have always been rooted in far more than collective intuition. And while enjoying a tree’s fruit while spurning its roots is possible in practice, it requires accepting the cognitive dissonance of an incoherent worldview.

Perhaps this is why Wilson, Holland, Ali, and others like them grew tired of upholding this charade—and why so many of them are now choosing to embrace Christianity as a package deal rather than parceling out its humanitarian values a la carte.

In Christian circles, such long-awaited intellectual triumph provides reason for much rejoicing—but that’s not to say there is no cause for critique.

This is especially true in the case of Holland and others who may not have publicly professed a personal faith yet still consider themselves “essentially” Christian. After all, even Richard Dawkins, arguably the leader of the New Atheist movement and still an avowed atheist, has begun to call himself a “cultural Christian.”

Many have questioned the motivations behind these cultural conversions to Christianity, and some believers see it as a dangerous threat to the real thing. Secular cultural commentator Fredrik deBoer denounces the recent trend as a “Jonathan Haidt-style embrace of consequentialist religion,” or “belief in belief,” rather than a sign of genuine belief.

This is a matter worthy of our consideration. How do we distinguish between those who have fully assented to the truth of Christianity and those who have merely adopted it as a sociopolitical tool or cultural accessory? Can Christian culture be considered “Christian” if it’s divorced from actual faith in Christ? Should we celebrate or condemn those who appreciate the results and benefits of Christianity without accepting its creeds?

Yet even those who have made declarations of belief are scrutinized. Some argue intellectual assent is not enough to signal confessional faith, particularly in evangelical circles, explains Daniel K. Williams for CT, where a significant emphasis is placed on the experiential element of being “born again”—and any conversion that lacks this “feeling” is often cast into doubt.

Christianity has historically suffered from an unfortunate dichotomy between cognitive knowledge and subjective experience. On one hand, emotions can be fickle or even deceiving, and it is helpful to recognize the truth of Christianity even when our subjective experience leaves much to be desired. On the other, we must not weaken (or worse, abandon) the subjective element of a holistic faith.

A person’s conversion to faith is no less valid for seeming to lack a corresponding emotional response, since ecstatic experience is not a biblical requirement for salvation. Still, it would not be helpful simply to shift from one imbalance to another—from the super-subjective emphasis of the Jesus People to an overemphasis on cognitive knowledge devoid of feeling.

Ultimately, only time will tell whether this growing “New Christian” movement is merely a superficial cultural shift or whether stories of those like Wilson, Holland, Ali, and others represent a real and enduring return to God among society’s intellectuals.

In the meantime, perhaps there is room for a generous reading of this religious countercurrent to the massive wake left by the nones and dones. We must all start somewhere in our journey of faith, and every seed contains great potential for growth. As O. Alan Noble wrote for CT, “I see the real risks of cultural Christianity. But I believe unbelievers who are first attracted by the benefits, not the gospel, may yet stumble into the faith.”

Much good can be done, and has been done, in countries and cultures still living off the “borrowed interest” of the Christian metaphysic. And perhaps the same can be said of those still searching and reaching toward the light of truth. We might celebrate those being drawn away from secular atheism and into a humble appreciation for the flourishing Christianity has brought into our world—and pray that it ultimately points them to the one who inaugurated it.

Surely, we can join these intellectual admirers of Christianity in affirming the virtues of our Savior’s teachings and the blessings of emulating them. For even in his own time, Jesus declared that “whoever is not against us is for us” (Mark 9:40).

And to those who continue to seek out the goodness of Christ, perhaps we may echo his own encouragement and say, “You are not far from the kingdom of God” (Mark 12:34). In a world that is growing increasingly non-Christian, I find this to be good news after all.

Nathan Guy is associate professor of philosophy, theology, and ethics and serves as the executive director of the David E. Smith Healthcare Ethics and Human Dignity Initiative at Harding University. He is the author of Finding Locke’s God.

This article appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "The 'New Christian' Era".

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