‘This Is the Day’ for Filipinos to Develop Their Own Worship Music

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

In a country known for loving Western praise music—Hillsong’s second-biggest market—a grassroots movement is singing new tunes.

Courtesy of Gloryfall

Arnel Cadeliña, a pastor and worship leader in Manila, remembers when his parents called their only “born again” relative for help. It was 1983, Cadeliña was 12, and his family was convinced that his teenage sister was possessed by a demon.

“He showed up with two guitars and two singers,” Cadeliña recalled. “Then he said, ‘Let’s not mind her, let’s mind the name above all names,’ and they led us in worship songs.”

Cadeliña remembers singing simple praise choruses like “This Is the Day” and praying. He says he witnessed two miracles that day: the deliverance of his sister and the conversion of his family.

“We didn’t know the Bible, we didn’t understand God, but he showed up in the power of our music, in the power of our worship.”

Contemporary praise and worship music from the United States, Australia, and the UK has been a part of Cadeliña’s faith journey since its beginning.

Like many Protestant Christians in the Philippines, he grew as a believer while singing songs from direct-to-consumer cassette tapes by Integrity’s Hosanna! Music in the ’80s and ’90s, passed along by missionaries and within grassroots networks of churches. (“This is the Day,” the song Cadeliña remembers singing, was administered and distributed by Integrity.)

With the influence of Western worship music, Filipino leaders like Cadeliña are trying to balance local music with popular hits coming from the US-dominated worship music industry.

Cadeliña now leads FIJ (Faith in Jesus) City Church in Manila with his wife, Jessica, the church’s worship leader. The church is an independent Protestant church, with an auditorium that looks a lot like one you would find at a nondenominational church in the US: mostly black, with a stage lit by intelligent LEDs, outfitted with a high-end sound system and band instruments.

The Cadeliñas are both musicians, writing and recording original songs for their church and leading training workshops for church musicians in their region. Arnel loves the Western praise and worship music that has shaped his faith, but is determined not to let it dictate the musical practices of his church. For each service, they try to program two songs in Tagalog and two songs in English (the two official languages of the Philippines).

“We’ve had weeks when a team lined up a bunch of songs by Hillsong and Planetshakers,” he said. “If we don’t make a decision to do local songs, we would be overwhelmed,” he continued, by the global options and influence.

Because Christianity came to the Philippines through colonization, the Filipino church has always been deeply influenced by Western culture. Today, the Philippines is second only to the US in its 17 percent share of Hillsong Worship’s global audience, according to Chartmetric (the US audience is 28%). And the Philippines is the primary audience of the Australian group Planetshakers (33% of its listenership).

In metro Manila, most Filipino churches that use contemporary music sing a blend of English and Tagalog on Sunday mornings. Sometimes, congregations sing a single song in both languages (with the verses in Tagalog and the chorus in English, for example) and hear preaching in a blend of the two languages, Taglish.

Worship leaders can rarely find official worship song translations in Tagalog (or in any of 150-plus other native languages spoken in the Philippines), so some local musicians are working to develop their own repertoire.

Gloryfall, a collective of worship leaders around Manila, has been working on translations of popular worship songs since the pandemic. They have received approval from original recording artists to produce translations of over 30 hit songs, including “King of Kings” and “Who You Say I Am” from Hillsong.

“We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from local Christians who say that it’s been really meaningful to have these songs in Tagalog,” said drummer Harald Huyssen, a former missionary kid and a faculty member at the University of Santo Tomas Conservatory of Music in Manila.

“Singing the last chorus of a song in Tagalog rallies the congregation,” said Chester Elmeda, Gloryfall’s keyboardist. “I always look forward to the end of ‘King of Kings,’ when everyone starts singing in my language. That’s the power of your own native tongue.”

Gloryfall records its own music and runs a studio for other local musicians to use. The group has seen a growing enthusiasm for grassroots music in Tagalog.

“It’s easier for Filipinos to access the doctrine and theology in our native tongue,” said Rye Pecardal, the group’s bassist.

The growth of the Philippine market for worship music has caught the attention of the global music industry. In 2021, Sony Music Philippines launched a new Christian label, Waterwalk Records. Gloryfall was one of the first bands to join.

“I appreciate that the industry sees the value of Filipino Christian music and that a major label is supporting this work,” said Huyssen. “Why wouldn’t there be a Christian label? It’s interesting that it took so long. Sony is a business, it sees the value.”

On a global scale, the exchange of music is still relatively one-sided.

“With the current state of the industry, it would be almost impossible to send music the other way,” said Huyssen. “The rest of the world aspires to the level of production coming out of Nashville, for better or worse. It’s not a level playing field.”

Many Filipino worship leaders and church musicians see questions of provenance as distracting or counterproductive, while acknowledging that the dominance of music from one segment of the global church falls short of “on earth as it is in heaven.”

“We have to begin with a kingdom mindset, as opposed to a hemispheric mindset,” said Elmeda. “The best themes always come from the Word of God. There’s no competition. ‘How Great Is Our God’ takes the ‘me’ out of it.”

When a song coming from the US doesn’t resonate, they don’t use it. Huyssen said certain Western songs that deal with trials and struggles don’t strike the right tone in English lyrics written by a famous American artist.

“An American’s material struggle does not exactly relate to a Filipino’s material struggle,” said Huyssen. “But the more vertical songs, like ‘How Great Is Our God’ or ‘10,000 Reasons,’ have a universal theme. God’s using these songs powerfully here.”

Filipino leaders are very plugged into the broader worship music industry, and there is a lot of variation in how church leaders are choosing to deal with questions of music selection, similar to the US.

“Sure, there are churches here that will ban songs by Bethel or Hillsong. People pay attention,” said Jessica Cadeliña. But at their church, decisions about a particular song are made based on the merits of that particular song. “It’s not about the group, it’s about Jesus.”

“You have a culture in each church,” said Arnel Cadeliña. “You have to tailor your music to your congregation and your musicians. We’d love to play music by Israel Houghton—he’s so good. But the music is so difficult to play!”

The Cadeliñas’ worship music ministry has grown since they started leading training sessions and workshops in 2003. They are known as “Malayang Pilipino” (“Free Filipino”). It’s the name of the title track of their first album, written in 1998 to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the Philippines’ liberation from Spain.

The name stuck, completely by accident. “Malayang Pilipino” has continued to resonate as the Cadeliñas, Gloryfall, and other leaders navigate music ministry, balancing the freedom to embrace or reject outside influences with a commitment to the celebration of Filipino identity in the church.

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

News

Canadian Christian Colleges Hit Hard by New Immigration Restrictions

Adam MacInnis

International undergraduates were part of many schools’ plans for sustainability. A new government rule changes that.

SDI Productions / Getty

It seemed like a door had opened.

Providence University College and Theological Seminary in Manitoba started an associate’s degree program that could be marketed to international students. To president Kenton Anderson’s delight, the two-year degree attracted a significant number of applicants eager to study in Canada. Several hundred students enrolled.

For the private evangelical school, that generated significant revenue and helped further fulfill the mission of spreading the gospel around the world.

Providence made plans to grow the program—could they attract 500 international students? 600? 700?—and bought an apartment building in nearby Winnipeg to provide increased student housing.

Then, a single government decision closed that door.

Canada’s federal government announced new restrictions on undergraduate international students in January 2024. When the rules take effect this fall, the total number will be reduced by about 35 percent.

Providence was anticipating several hundred new international students. Now, when the semester starts the first week of September, the school will only greet about 20.

“It’s many millions of dollars of revenue just gone,” Anderson told CT. “And, of course, as a private tuition-funded Christian school, it’s not like we have a lot of that money lying around.”

According to the Canadian government, there are several reasons to reduce the number of international students at Canadian colleges and universities. Officials said they were concerned that lax admissions were diminishing the quality of the country’s education.

“We want to ensure that international students are successful and to tackle the issues that make students vulnerable and hurt the integrity of the International Student Program,” Julie Lafortune, a spokeswoman for the department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, told CT in an email.

The government was also concerned about the strain that the influx of internationals puts on the already stressed housing market. Many cities across Canada have seen housing costs skyrocket in recent years. Experts estimate 5.8 million new homes would have to be built by 2030 to bring prices back down to affordable levels.

“While international students are not responsible for the challenges that communities are facing in housing, health care, and other services, the growth in the number of international students is unsustainable and has added significant demand for services that all Canadians must be able to access,” Lafortune said.

The new rule sets limits on international students for each province. The provinces will then determine the allocation of that limited number of students—how many will go to one school, how many to another.

In Manitoba, the government decided to prioritize permits for international students attending public universities. Providence was allowed just a small amount.

Anderson said the combined decisions of the federal and provincial governments were enough to threaten the existence of the evangelical university. But Providence isn’t alone, he said. Many institutions of higher education are going to suffer.

“That was a very popular move politically for them to make, but it was a bit of a blunt instrument,” he said. “It just kind of like hit everybody.”

Kingswood University in New Brunswick will notice the hit.

In its 80-year history, the Methodist-affiliated school has come to rely on the flow of enrollments from abroad. Sometimes as much as 40 percent of the student body has been international. The majority have come from the United States, but many have come from further away as well, reflecting Kingswood’s Methodist ties and its missions-minded identity.

“It’s impossible for us to do what we were chosen and funded to do because of this new rule,” president Stephen Lennox told CT.

In the rural community of Sussex, where the university is located, housing is not a major problem, according to Lennox. He understands the government concerns about education quality and housing stock, but neither issue actually applies to Kingswood. So the rule doesn’t solve anything but does seriously hurt the school.

Christian Higher Education Canada sent a letter to Marc Miller, minister of immigration, refugees, and citizenship, asking him to reconsider. Lennox, who is on the board, is one of the leaders at 22 Christian schools in Canada who signed the appeal.

“Our schools provide theological education, preparing individuals to fill positions as pastors and other religious professionals,” it said. “Limiting the number of international students restricts us in our mission to help alleviate the pastoral leadership deficit in churches around the world.”

One major issue that will impact Kingswood is the change to the process of admitting US students. Americans who want to study at evangelical schools in Canada will find it’s a bit more difficult than it was before.

“They’ve always been allowed to enter by a door that’s a little easier to pass through than a typical international student. Now they all have to come through the same door,” Lennox said. “A student two hours away in Calais, Maine, has to go through the same process that someone coming from Swaziland has to go through. And to me, that just doesn’t seem to make any sense.”

Some evangelical schools in Canada have seen problems with housing. The government concern about people having places to live is relevant to their context. But they were already figuring out solutions.

“Finding housing in Moncton can be a challenge,” said Darrell Nevers, marketing and communications manager at Crandall University, a school associated with the Canadian Baptists of Atlantic Canada. “However, our student network is strong; most students can find suitable housing before arrival or soon afterwards. We also work with community partners to help students find safe and affordable housing.”

Crandall, which is also in New Brunswick, typically recruits between 400 and 450 international students each year to the Moncton campus—just under 50 percent of overall enrollment. The largest numbers of students come from India, Nigeria, Colombia, Ghana, and Bangladesh. The majority are enrolled in graduate programs, however, which are exempt from the new restrictions for now.

That reduces the impact but doesn’t entirely eliminate it. Crandall is welcoming only 8–12 international undergraduate students this fall but 140 additional students are enrolled in graduate programs.

“While we are certainly concerned that these changes will impact our undergraduate student enrollment, we believe that our provincial government has been incredibly fair in how they have allocated numbers to New Brunswick schools,” Nevers said.

Faced with the new restrictions, some universities have chosen to pivot.

“We feel like the Lord has definitely closed a door for this season. We hope that it opens again, either with a change of government or just because they see there is a better way. But we also feel like, ‘Hey, the Lord wants us to exist. What other options are out there for us?’” said Lennox at Kingswood.

Currently, the school has plans to offer a one-year master’s in leadership starting in January 2025. Those students will be exempt from the new restriction, and Kingswood hopes to recruit enough of them to offset the losses in undergraduate enrollment. Since it’s a one-year program instead of a four-year program, however, they will have to recruit at a faster rate.

Providence has also taken steps to expand its graduate offerings. Anderson said it was incredibly difficult for faculty and staff to get a new program in place as quickly as they needed to, but it was essential to the future of the institution.

“It was just one of those things where you do or die, so to speak,” the president said. “We’re doing a lot of things to strengthen our work and our sustainability as an institution and what we offer to the kingdom of God, to the church, to our communities.”

New graduate programs will bring about 300 international students to Providence this fall. That alleviates immediate financial concerns, but school officials have a new awareness of how easily that could change. Recruiting more international students no longer seems like a key piece of a solid plan for sustainability.

“The international work was good in that it was helping buy time, essentially,” Anderson said. “Now, we’re going to have to dig a little deeper.”

- More from Adam MacInnis

News

Wire Story

Historic First Baptist Dallas Sanctuary Burns in Four-Alarm Fire

Baptist Press

The 134-year-old landmark, now a nearby secondary meeting space for the church, went up in flames in downtown Dallas.

Courtesy of First Baptist Dallas

The historic sanctuary at First Baptist Church Dallas burned Friday evening, July 19. The cause of the blaze is not yet known. The Victorian-style, red brick sanctuary building was erected 1890 and is a recognized Texas Historic Landmark.

According to media reports, Dallas Fire and Rescue received a call at 6:05 p.m., Friday evening regarding a building on fire in downtown Dallas.

Firefighters responded and within 15 minutes of the first call, a second alarm was requested. Then around 7:30 p.m., the scene was upgraded to a three-alarm fire. A fourth alarm was called in around 8:15 p.m. The Dallas Morning News reported that “more than 60 units were dispatched to respond to the structure fire.”

The church released a statement on X at 9:34 p.m. saying the primary fire was extinguished but firefighters were still working at the scene.

First Baptist Church Dallas has an indelible history within the Southern Baptist Convention having been pastored by former SBC presidents George W. Truett and W. A. Criswell. Currently led by Robert Jeffress, First Baptist Dallas reported a membership of nearly 16,000 in 2023.

The church currently worships in a state-of-the-art facility, which opened in 2013, adjacent to the historic sanctuary.

Jeffress posted on X Friday night asking for prayers for the church, saying, “We have experienced a fire in the Historic Sanctuary. To our knowledge, no one is hurt or injured, and we thank God for His protection. He is sovereign even in the most difficult times.”

The historic sanctuary was home to First Baptist Dallas’s contemporary service each week, called the Band-Led Service. There was a special VBS service scheduled for this Sunday, June 21. The church hosted its annual Vacation Bible School this week.

“We are grateful that no life has been lost that we know of even though we just had 2,000 children and volunteers on campus for Vacation Bible School earlier in the day,” Jeffress said in a statement to Baptist Press.

“As tragic as the loss of this old sanctuary is, we are grateful that the church is not bricks and wood but composed of over 16,000 people who are determined more than ever before to reach the world for the gospel of Christ.”

The church campus consists of multiple buildings across a six-block footprint in downtown Dallas. At this time, it is unknown if any other buildings were damaged in the fire.

According to a statement from the church, “The Historic Sanctuary was a significant landmark in Downtown Dallas. It was the site of visits from Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Gerald Ford, and George H. W. Bush. President Donald Trump visited the new worship center of the church in 2021.”

Jeffress, who has served as senior pastor since 2007, grew up at First Baptist Dallas and had been mentored by Criswell. The church stated that “he was baptized in the Historic Sanctuary at age 9, ordained there when he was 21, and holds many memories of the church.”

“We thank the Dallas Fire Department and Dallas Police Department for their quick action, courage, and ongoing aid,” Jeffress added.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.

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News

In Pennsylvania, Locals Remember Corey Comperatore’s ‘Greater Love’

Harvest Prude, with Megan Fowler in Sarver, Pennsylvania

Communities surrounding Trump’s rally site feel the shock of the tragic shooting.

Matt Slocum / AP

Corey Comperatore loved reading Romans.

His pastor at Cabot Methodist Church, Jonathan Fehl, recalled how much Comperatore drew strength from the book. It was the first thing he’d recommend to new believers.

But it may be that Comperatore is remembered by another portion of Scripture, John 15:13: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

Comperatore was the kind of church member who showed up every Sunday, took part in small groups, became a member of the congregation’s board of trustees, and helped with building projects. He was an Army veteran, volunteer firefighter, and proud “girl dad”—a guy who did everything with “a heart of service to the Lord,” Fehl wrote.

His final act of love and sacrifice came on Saturday, when he yelled, “Get down!” before diving in front of his wife and daughters to protect them from a bullet intended for former president Donald Trump.

The 50-year-old died on the scene from a gunshot wound to the head.

Comperatore was thrust into national news, the single fatality of a shooting that has left his community in Western Pennsylvania in grief, shock, and trauma.

“There’s just a lot of sadness,” Brandon Lenhart, senior pastor at North Main Street Church of God in Butler, told CT. “That somebody lost their life in the event, that that happened in the small town of Butler. It’s not a way we wanted to be put on the map, quite frankly.”

His church is on the other side of town from the Butler Farm Show, where Trump’s rally was held. It’s a conservative area—“you see pro-Trump signs everywhere,” Lenhart said—and people drove in from surrounding towns to cheer on the Republican candidate.

Comperatore and his family came from Sarver, just 16 miles southwest of the Farm Show. It’s small, with a population of 8,486, and was once just a tiny milling village. Its Wikipedia page lists only two notable figures: a pageant winner, and now, Comperatore.

The drive from Butler and Sarver winds through hilly farmland, a patchwork of corn, soy, and wheat fields, pastures filled with grazing livestock, and hay bales dotting the horizon. Many of its residents find work at nearby manufacturing facilities. Comperatore had been an engineer at a plastics plant.

At the Lernerville Speedway in Sarver, hundreds gathered on Wednesday for a vigil in remembrance of their friend and neighbor. Many were dressed in red, white, and blue. They sat on slippery bleachers around the racetrack, wet from an afternoon downpour, to hear pastors, friends, and firefighters pay tribute to “one of the best men” they knew.

Members of Sonrise Community Church, another congregation in Sarver, offered prayers and sang before the crowd of 300. They repeatedly referenced Corey’s “greater love” and how he was willing to lay down his life for others. As his daughter Allyson wrote in tribute, “He truly loved us enough to take a real bullet for us.”

“You’ve heard about who [Corey] is. … We’ve also heard the most important part, about whose he is,” said Fehl, Comperatore’s pastor. “He knew that he belonged to Jesus Christ. That’s the reason he lived a life of service the way he did. He was a witness to the grace of God at work in his life.”

The crowd bowed their heads for the Lord’s Prayer and then lifted glowing candles and iPhone flashlights while MercyMe’s “I Can Only Imagine” played over the speaker.

One attendee, Bonnie Waldenville, came to the vigil because her husband graduated from high school with Comperatore. “It really hurts here,” Waldenville pointed to her heart, “for his wife.”

Adam Salinas, a local chaplain and pastor in the Pittsburgh area, came to offer support. He has prayed several times with the staff of local nursing homes in the wake of the rally. “It has been very sad for our whole community,” he said.

A private funeral will be held for Comperatore on Friday at Cabot Church, followed by a procession of fire trucks.

At every church in the area, you find people who knew Comperatore, who were at the rally themselves, or who are still feeling the ache of the shooting and the scare of what could have been.

“Jesus, we are at a different place than we were 24 hours ago,” David Janz, pastor of Butler First Church, a Methodist congregation, prayed on the Sunday morning after the rally. “Violence is all around us, but it seems to have come home a lot more strong and evident because of what happened last night.”

He prayed for Trump, the Comperatore family, and the two other individuals, David Dutch and James Copenhaver, who had suffered injuries during the shooting. He also prayed for the family of the shooter.

“We pray for them. We pray for our community. It doesn’t feel as safe as it used to,” he said. “Help us, Lord, to take these moments to fix our eyes again on Jesus.”

When Lenhart and his wife, Saralee, who is worship pastor at North Main Street Church, heard about the shooting, they were having a rare date at an Italian restaurant in neighboring Zelienople. They knew members of their congregation had been at the rally.

But getting back to the flock wasn’t so easy. The area had morphed into a crime scene: Choppers scouted the air and law enforcement shuttered roads near the rally location and the hospital where they’d taken Trump. “It turned a 15-, 20-minute drive into a 45-minute drive to take all the alternate routes back into town,” Lenhart said. “It was a bit surreal.”

They made it to a house around a mile from the Butler Farm Show grounds.

One of their congregants had fled there with around 20 other rally goers who couldn’t make it home. She’d gotten a VIP ticket and had been in the stands behind Trump. Less than ten feet away, one row behind her and down the bench a little, had sat the Comperatores.

“Bullets were coming through that section of the stands. She’s pretty traumatized by what she saw,” said Lenhart, who prayed and spoke with them, also suggesting further resources of counseling and therapy.

The next day, he addressed his congregation before worship.

“It’s a traumatic event,” he told them. “So what do we do with all of this? We don’t react. We become proactive. And you know what the believer in Christ does when there’s a crisis? Can I show you?”

Lenhart dropped to his knees and clasped his hands in a posture of prayer. The church applauded.

“I wanted to make sure people understood our response is not social media, our response is not vitriol, picketing, protesting,” he said in an interview with CT. “As believers in Christ, our first response is always to seek the Lord.”

Nearby churches are rallying to help the community process and heal. On Saturday, North Main Street Church is hosting a free crisis response event with the Christian counseling agency it shares offices with. Christian Counseling Associates will speak to attendees about the shooting and the fallout, then break into small groups for discussion.

Last weekend, Lenhart had stayed up wondering whether to scrap his sermon. Instead, he shared some reflections and quoted from Ecclesiastes and the book that happened to be Comperatore’s favorite, Romans.

“Regardless of what side of the aisle you sit on, violence is never warranted. And I think we can agree, hopefully as the body of Christ, that this is not only an abhorrent thing that happened in our local community, it’s something that, as believers in Christ, we should never celebrate on one side or the other,” he said. “We are told in Romans chapter 12 that we are not to overcome evil with more evil, but to overcome evil with good.”

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Church Life

Is God Calling Me to Obscurity or Influence?

E. L. Sherene Joseph

I want to write to build up the body of Christ, but platform building takes time away from my local congregation.

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

I recently spoke with a pastor in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. His congregation is small—150 or so members—and his routine is busy, with duties extending far beyond the walls of the church building.

The pastor’s typical week is a testament to his dedication to his parishioners. Most of his time is devoted to visitation, prayer, and pastoral care, often in nursing homes and hospitals. He reserves Saturdays for sermon prep and tries to keep Fridays for time with his family.

Sometimes, the pastor receives invitations to go further afield: to speak at conferences, contribute to Christian media outlets, or even write books—all alluring opportunities and a sign of his intellectual prowess and extensive network in ministry circles. However, he typically declines when considering how much that work and absence would affect his flock’s spiritual growth. Instead of building a platform, he is nurturing a community. Or, in the words of author Jen Pollock Michel, he is leading a life instead of leaving a story.

I have struggled with that choice for myself. After graduating from seminary, I started writing and teaching at my local church. Because I didn’t need to make money from my writing, I’ve had the luxury of flexibility, and soon, looking for places to be published became a job in itself. It was gratifying and humbling to be invited to be a member of a writers’ guild and have others promote my work. But I also started to see that regularly writing for public consumption was complicated, hard, and unsustainable if I wanted to remain invested in my congregation.

I want to write to serve the church, but writing increasingly takes time away from my actual church. Suppose I spend all my time pitching publications, building my following, creating Christian content, and trying to make it in the “Evangelical Industrial Complex.” Am I still being Christ to others? Am I showing his love?

On the other hand, if I feel a calling to write and believe I have something worthwhile and faithful to say, is it wrong to use my talent to promote my work? Should I be content with obscurity, like the pastor in Pennsylvania? Should I sit with the woman whose mother died, whose husband walked away, or who got a phone call from her doctor about a CT scan? I have often asked myself whether I have the intelligence, wisdom, and resilience to navigate the life of a Christian writer.

This spring’s discourse among Christian writers on the dynamics of Christian ministry and the publishing landscape suggests I’m not alone in asking this question. The whole conversation is shaped by how technological changes have transformed how writing works. In some ways, publishing is now democratized. Between podcasts, social media, Substack and other newsletters, and video platforms like YouTube and TikTok, there’s no dearth of Christian content, and minimal barriers to entry enable many more voices to speak on theology, spiritual growth, and Christian living.

The trouble is what happens after entry. The journey toward recognition entails deliberately cultivating a personal brand and professional network. “Publishers are constantly evaluating book proposals, not on the content of the book alone, but on the platform of the author,” Michel wrote on Substack, in a post about deciding to quit publishing but keep writing. “Can this person write? Yes, it’s one question. But I’d argue it’s not even the most important one in the publishing calculus. Can this person sell? Now we’re talking.”

You have to build a robust digital presence and expand your audience. You hope other writers will promote your work just as you promote theirs—whom you know and tag on your social profiles becomes currency. It’s not enough to be gifted by the Spirit; you must market your gifts on social media. You create Instagram content, write nuggets of wisdom, and start doing reels in the hope that the more content you create, the more people will notice.

Is this how I should be spending my time? Where does it leave my lay ministry? Where does it leave people going through divorce, illness, and parenting struggles—or people just looking for community? If I write about Christ, am I neglecting his body? As theologian Nika Spaulding asked when I interviewed her, “Am I missing the imperative to prioritize the needs of the local church? Do I require a recalibration of aspirations and ambitions?”

I wrestle with this every day. I believe God calls me to faithful service where I am planted, to love God and love people in my local church—not to be a platform builder or influencer, seeking an admiring audience’s validation (and dopamine hit). But I also believe writing is a way God has equipped me to serve, and the publishing industry says I must build a platform if I want anyone to read my work. In my conversations with journalist and writer Devi Abraham, she observed that in American Christianity, like American culture more broadly, it seems “obscurity is not the answer for success.”

I don’t have a settled answer to these questions, but I do have more questions that may bring clarity—and a story that reframed my thinking.

Can we find contentment in obscurity? “I spoke at two rather large women’s events, and for the first time, did not incentivize anyone to subscribe to my newsletter,” author and ministry leader Sarah K. Butterfield said of a period in which she took a break from writing. “I showed up with the sole purpose of serving those who attended with no hopes of growing my following. The result was liberating!”

Do we have it in us to do likewise? How would our writing, pitching, and publishing habits change if we weren’t constantly trying to increase our readership? Is there a dissonance in our souls, such that we cannot be satisfied with the little and constantly find ourselves longing for more?

If God has given us a creative gift, what does it mean to use it for his glory? We must use our gifts for God and the extension of his kingdom, but what if the reach that he wants us to have in our ministries, either church or parachurch, was meant to be limited? What if he wants us to minister—or even write—to just a small number of people, not 20,000 books sold but faithfulness to the few in our circle? Our “platform” might be a local church or neighborhood.

“Serving in a local church and community is hard, challenging, and exhausting,” Bible teacher Jen Wilkin told me. But it is also gratifying to see, in person, people come alive in the knowledge of Scripture and love for God. In the digital cacophony of voices vying for attention and affirmation, we in Christian ministry need to find ways to build substantive relationships and foster the growth of spiritual depth in those within our literal reach.

I had a long chat about this with Al Hsu, associate editorial director at InterVarsity Press. Even in the publishing industry, he said, “Platform is not”—or should not be—“an end in itself. It is an extension of our mission and vocation.” Our platforms should align with our callings and whom we are called to serve, so platforms must look different for different people.

Can we be patient in our development? Like many writers, I’ve aspired to be like the leaders, teachers, and authors who have massive platforms and have reached fame. Perhaps I will someday, but they did not get to that level overnight. Prominent writers like Beth Moore and Ann Voskamp “labored largely unknown for years,” as writer Karen Swallow Prior has noted, “and, more importantly, didn’t set out in hopes of gaining the wide platforms they have.”

Author Christine Caine writes about how she was “developed, not discovered.” She desired to serve God at an early age, so when church leaders asked her to serve on the cleanup team as a young adult, she agreed. That led to greater responsibility and mentorship, and after years of wiping up messes, her faithful yes at 21 prepared her for the massive ministry she leads today. God developed her faith and skills in obscurity.

What do we actually want? Maybe God wants us to minister on a small, local scale. Or maybe he’ll help us write for millions. In either case, author Mary DeMuth said in our conversation, we must pay attention to our hearts. “Do we find ourselves loving the feed more than the people behind the feed?” she asked. “God is calling people to the context of loving humans with skin on, and we need to seek to bless them, love them, and know them.”

God calls us to a life of knowing him and walking with him, and we must cultivate that first. If a large audience is something God wants for us, he can bring it to pass. We need not waste our time striving for prominence and platform. We can grow where we are planted, grow in the knowledge of God, and practice his presence in the mundane. The true measure of success is not a follower count or sales record but our depth of fidelity to God.

I recently read a short history of the Frankish princess Bertha, who moved to Canterbury in the English kingdom of Kent around the year 580 to marry its pagan king, Ethelbert. Christianity had been introduced to England at that time but had not yet been widely established.

Bertha was a person of strong Christian faith. She married on the condition of being permitted to remain a Christian and brought a bishop with her to her new home. She corresponded with the pope, who later wrote that her “good deeds are known not only among the Romans … but also through various places.”

In 597, after years of Bertha’s apparently “unsuccessful” faithfulness, a mission team led by a monk named Augustine arrived from Rome. On reaching Kent, they preached the gospel to the king, who finally acknowledged Christ’s sovereignty. Many people followed the king’s example, and Canterbury became the center of Christianity in England. To this day, it is the spiritual home of many Christians.

Bertha left no writings and no record of public exercise of power. Yet her years of faithfulness helped lead to the evangelism of England and many other nations. Today, UNESCO recognizes her prayer chapel as the oldest place of unbroken Christian worship and witness in the English-speaking world. God used her prayers to do immeasurably more than she could have ever asked or imagined (Eph. 3:20).

He may use our obscure faithfulness the same way. While “we prefer the spectacular,” as author Skye Jethani has said, referencing the parable of the sower, “God is happy to work through the subtle. And while we think outcomes are based upon how God’s Word is proclaimed, God knows the outcomes are determined by how his Word is received.” Is our concern to build a platform for ourselves, or is it to be the hands and feet of Christ, sowing where we can and letting God give the increase?

E. L. Sherene Joseph is an adult third culture kid and writer who focuses on faith, community, and culture. As an immigrant to the United States, she shares her experiences of living between different worlds. You can find more of her work at www.sherenejoseph.me.

- More from E. L. Sherene Joseph

Church Life

Pakistan’s Presbyterians Have United. Reconciling Will Take Time.

Isabel Ong

After 60 years of division, leaders hope that coming together will strengthen the church’s witness.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

On March 25 of this year, a group of Pakistani Presbyterian church leaders gathered in one of their homes. There, the 20 or so people decided to bring their factions together after years of contentious division. Later, they gathered for tea and seviyan, a sweet vermicelli dessert cooked in sugar and milk or oil, at Gujranwala Theological Seminary.

There were no contracts or legal documents to mark this momentous decision. “We just talked and trusted each other,” said Reuben Qamar, the leader, or moderator, of one faction.

The Presbyterian Church of Pakistan (PCP) has a long history in the country, where Christians comprise less than 2 percent of the population. The Presbyterian mission was founded in the 1860s, and its missionaries led mass conversion movements and set up schools and hospitals in the region. In 1961, it was declared an autonomous body and local leadership began stewarding it.

This was when the divisions started: first between the ’60s and ’70s, then in the ’90s, and more recently in 2018 and 2021, says Qamar, noting that the splits mainly occurred not because of doctrinal differences but because of power and corruption.

One major conflict arose when there was a dispute on whether a moderator could extend their term from three to five years. Some supported this change, while others did not.

By the end of 2023, the church was split into three factions: One led by Qamar, and two others by moderators Arif Siraj and Javed Gill, respectively. Each claimed to be the Presbyterian Church of Pakistan.

The root of the problem was discipline, says Majeed Abel, the executive secretary in Siraj’s former faction. Whenever conflicts arose, people took “refuge” in splitting and creating a “parallel church” with presbyteries that sometimes consisted only of one member, he said.

These divisions contributed to “the weakening of the church,” and the denomination’s nearly 300 churches were left in turmoil, Qamar also said.

There were disputes in the congregations, where people demanded that their pastor be installed and another terminated. Some of these disagreements turned into court cases, with pastors fighting to prove that they were the legally recognized leader of a church.

This year’s pledge for unity in the PCP arose out of the Presbyterian leaders’ shared desire to mend broken bonds. But unity—and what that looks like practically—has meant different things to different people.

For some leaders, returning to the PCP’s original mission—to carry out the Great Commission—was a big motivating factor in pursuing unity.

“The real mission of the church [was] being ignored. … We [were] going in the courts against each other,” said Qamar.

What convicted him to reconcile with the other factions’ leaders was the passage in John 17:20–23 where Jesus says, “I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.” “[Our] purpose is to share the gospel, to become the witness of Christ,” said Qamar. “As a church, we have to share the love of God with this world, and we can achieve these goals only with unity.”

Some leaders also felt a strong desire to restore the PCP’s good standing nationally and internationally. “The divide brought a bad reputation to the church, with the leadership being seen as power hungry,” lamented faction leader Gill.

For Gill, being one body in Christ looks like following the Presbyterian church’s constitution, which states there should be a “united assembly” under one leader as “we are ordered to have one shepherd and one flock.”

“Such divisions weaken the body of Christ, especially in Pakistan, where we already live under unfavorable conditions,” said Azhar Mushtaq, Pakistan Bible Society’s general secretary.

“The conflict affected our interaction with church leadership, making it difficult to identify the genuine leaders.”

At present, the leaders of the different factions meet every month and are planning to visit churches around the country together to advocate for unity. They are also hoping to hold a general assembly by September, where leaders will step down from their positions and let the house appoint a single moderator over the entire Presbyterian church body.

“Despite some bitter experiences, the entire leadership is now committed to forgiveness,” Gill said. The Bible verses that led him to pursue unity with the other factions was 1 Corinthians 1:12–13, where some say “I follow Paul,” and others say “I follow Apollos” or “I follow Cephas.” Is Christ divided?

Reconciliation is a slow work in progress, particularly at the local church level, say many of the leaders CT interviewed.

And there are some who oppose this move because they see each other as enemies, Qamar said.

“The presbyteries that were split … must be reconciled as well,” Abel said. While he is not involved in ongoing reconciliation efforts, he is “happy to reconcile” with the other groups.

“During the peace meeting, we have unanimously agreed to send a reconciliation commission to these presbyteries, but no one seems to be interested in that.”

PCP pastors like Sheraz Sharif Alam and Romella Robinson echoed their leaders’ concerns. The couple, who serve in Gakhar, Gujranwala—a two-hour car ride north of Lahore—have firsthand experience of how the PCP’s long-lasting divisions have impacted local ministry.

The PCP’s financial woes began in 2018. One faction controlled all the bank accounts and used up all the investments and money for litigation purposes and for securing favors from pastors, Qamar shared. Partners such as the US-based Outreach Foundation, which helps churches around the world grow their capacity and reach, stopped their funding because of corruption and the lack of an accountability system. Major projects in community development and mission work are currently halted.

Pastors like Alam and Robinson do not receive a salary. They rely on tithes and thanksgiving offerings like vegetables from their congregation to survive. The financial crunch means that some pastors must turn to other forms of work to support their families. And the PCP’s leaders have not said or done anything to change the current situation, they said.

“Right now, we are principally reconciled, but we are separately working,” said Alam, who also serves as general secretary in Qamar’s former faction. The people who will likely attend the upcoming general assembly are selected from a 2017 list of delegates, which does not include those who have become pastors in the last seven years, Alam added.

Greater transparency about efforts toward reconciliation among the factions would be beneficial, said Robinson. “Leaders must delegate their understanding and wisdom to the coming generation so that they will be able to become good leaders in the future,” she said.

Ongoing persecution against Christians in Pakistan may generate a deeper desire to set differences aside.

For the past two years, the country has ranked seventh on Open Doors’ World Watch List of the top 50 countries where it’s hardest to be a Christian. In 2020 and 2021, it was in the top five.

Last year, mobs in Jaranwala plundered, vandalized, and burned down 26 churches. In May, 72-year-old Christian Lazar Masih was attacked and killed by a mob in Sargodha for allegedly committing blasphemy. In July, young believer Ehsan Shan was sentenced to death for purportedly circulating blasphemous content on TikTok.

After Masih and his family were brutally attacked, PCP leaders and members from the three factions traveled to Sargodha. The group, including Abel, Qamar, and Siraj, met Masih’s brother, also a Presbyterian. They visited the place where the attack had occurred. They spoke with social activists and people from the local peace committee, some of whom were Muslim, and demanded that the people who attacked Masih should be brought to the courts. They campaigned for justice to be served with Christian politicians who were present, like members of the provincial assembly Ejaz Alam Augustine and Sonia Ashir.

Representatives from civic society and the government were “very happy to see us united and together in such an event,” Qamar said.

“This is the work of God, and I trust in God that the Holy Spirit will work in the church.”

Additional reporting by Asif Aqeel

- More from Isabel Ong

Books

Your Party Will Not Win This Election

Russell Moore

And that’s a good thing—because how we think about victory is not only delusional but damaging.

Republican presidential candidate and former US president Donald Trump (L) looks at US president Joe Biden during the CNN Presidential Debate.

Andrew Harnik / Staff / Getty

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

With Election Day 2024 in sight, I can make one bold prediction: Your party is not going to win.

You might challenge me on this, saying, “But, RDM, you don’t know what party I, the reader, support.” That’s true—but I stand by my forecast. That’s because no matter what party wins the presidency, the Congress, or the state houses this November, no one is going to win.

I do not mean, of course, that one party or other won’t see its candidate in the Oval Office come January, or that we won’t see people being sworn in as members of Congress, senators, governors, and all the rest. That kind of winning will happen, as it always does. What I mean is that no one is going to win the way too many of us define winning in this strange era.

In his new book American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again, Yuval Levin points out a dangerous illusion of the present: the notion that after one decisive victory, whoever is “on the other side” will go away and will not need to be accommodated.

In truth, Levin argues, American life is pulled in two directions: toward what could be called “conservatism” in one direction and “progressivism” in the other. Those visions look different in different times—and, often, the two sides swap out on specific policy positions—but the basic tension is always there.

This is because, Levin writes, any group of human beings is going to have disagreements. A constitutional order doesn’t eradicate those disagreements but instead structures a careful balance between majority rule and minority rights.

Levin argues that one of the reasons—with some exceptions, of course—that local and state politics tend to be less toxic than national presidential elections is that, usually, those debates tend to be about issues more immediately recognized as practical—what roads get paved, what hospitals get funded—and thus “lend themselves better to bargaining and accommodation.”

At the national level, though, our candidates and our parties aren’t as much about specific issues as they are about tribal identity. Even when motivated by grievance and resentment, as national politics now are, the grievances and resentments are about far different things than, say, the issue of free silver in the William Jennings Bryan era or corporate monopolies in the Theodore Roosevelt era. What this leads to, Levin contends, is the current situation—in which presidential elections become about “political expression” rather than “civic action.”

When we peel down below issues of national scope, we often find that the fundamental problem is not that the “other side” isn’t going to accomplish what we want but that the other side exists at all. With that in mind, we can assume that this one election will put all that aside, and that those people, whoever they are, now permanently defeated and humiliated, will go away. But this is not true.

In his book Democracy and Solidarity, political scientist James Davison Hunter identifies this very dynamic as a culture logic that seeks not specific policy goals but something much bigger: recognition and status and identity.

When that isn’t achieved, we poison ourselves with fantasies that one day—maybe right now—we will finally enact revenge on those who have injured us by not conferring the status we believe we deserve. We want to find our own identity in the kind of “negative solidarity” that unites against a common oppressor. We start, then, to assume that every election is working toward a post-election reality where, as the old hymn puts it, “every foe is vanquished.”

In that kind of world, Hunter argues, in which the sense of status cannot ever be wholly fulfilled, the injury must be constantly emphasized. “Take away the injury, take away its cause, take away the revenge it seeks, and both meaning and identity for the aggrieved dissolve,” he writes.

If what we are seeking is not civic action but status, then outrage becomes authority. This quest for moral worth, status recognition, and self-esteem lends itself to precisely the kind of reality-television identity politics that we see right now.

This becomes a cycle. The more we expect of our politics to express who we are, the less we expect our politics to actually do. That kind of politics, after all, is going to result every time in what we’ve seen over the past 15 years: narrow majorities that teeter back and forth between the parties. Big goals—a New Deal, a Cold War victory, a moon landing—seem out of touch, so we replace those goals with what Hunter calls “millennialism.”

Millennialism is, of course, not a political doctrine but a theological one, rooted in the Book of Revelation’s language of a thousand-year reign of Christ and his people. From the very beginning, Christians have argued about what that means—is it a present reality in heaven or a future expectation after the reign of Christ, or something else? History shows that when those sorts of messianic expectations bubble up without the presence of the actual Messiah, they lead, at worst, to bloodshed—and, at best, to disillusionment and disappointment.

If Joe Biden (or whoever the Democratic nominee turns out to be) wins, the Trumpists and whatever passes for the “right” these days will still be here. If Donald Trump is elected president, the “left” will still be around. Whatever your political views, you can’t have your millennium unless half the country is Raptured.

In his forthcoming book One Lost Soul: Richard Nixon’s Search for Salvation, CT news editor Daniel Silliman looks at the 50th anniversary of the resignation of Richard Nixon through the grid of Nixon’s lifelong quest for approval.

Nixon’s father, Silliman recounts, ran a general store in what used to be a church, hollowing out the steeple so he could sit and survey the store from there, yelling criticisms at his son to work harder, do better. Silliman demonstrates how Nixon sought security throughout his life in the approval of the voters who would send him to office, in Dwight Eisenhower as a father figure, and in his own triumph over the “elites” from Harvard and Yale who had looked down on him.

Silliman argues that the reason we even have the Watergate tapes is because of that drive for approval. Who, after all, would record the audio of every single moment in the White House? Silliman compares Nixon’s motivation to the old Jack Chick tracts, “This Was Your Life,” in which, before the judgment seat, the sinner sees his entire life replayed in front of everyone (this tract terrified me as a child).

“Nixon had a similar fantasy—a complete recording, everyone on tape from his time in the White House,” Silliman writes. “But in his version, he thought, he would not be condemned but justified.” With a record of his accomplishment as president, he could prove that he had done a good job, that he was worthy of existing, that he was a great man.

The tapes, of course, did the opposite. They showed him to be exactly what he feared people would think he was: crooked, dishonest, a failure—the first president in history to be forced to resign.

Nixon was driven by the wrong things. He expected too much, and public opinion could never love him back. Politics could never be a judgment seat that could justify his life. In this moment in history, we expect something very similar out of our politics: a vindication of who’s right and who’s wrong, a separation of the sheep from the goats, a final and definitive victory.

If that’s what we think winning is, none of us will win. We will just descend more and more into resentment and outrage. We will turn on those we counted on to give us what they never could, or we will seethe in our fantasies of “next time,” when we (this time for sure!) will get that ultimate win.

That’s not what winning is. Until we lose that expectation, we will keep losing—not just as a republic but as people whose lives are meant to be about much more than keeping score.

No one will win this election, ultimately. No one will lose this election, ultimately. Maybe we should ask whether we are seeking something where it can never be found, and ask ourselves whether we should be looking Somewhere else.

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

News

Evangelicals Agree That Biden Should Drop Out

Kate Shellnutt

Poll: Black Protestants are among the only groups who remain confident in the president’s mental capacities.

Mario Tama / Getty Images

With mounting scrutiny over President Joe Biden’s fitness for the 2024 election, most evangelical Protestants believe that Biden should drop out of the race, though a sizable number of Black Protestants continue to back him.

A new poll from AP-NORC found that evangelicals agree with the rest of the country: 67 percent of evangelicals and 70 percent of Americans overall want Biden to withdraw.

Among both groups, fewer than one in five (18%) see him as capable of winning the election. Less than 2 percent of Republicans say Biden can win.

Concerns around Biden’s abilities accelerated after his performance in a debate with former president Donald Trump in June, and a growing list of Democratic politicians and supporters have come forward asking him to step aside.

In one interview, he said he’d only drop out if “the Lord Almighty” asked him to.

Black Protestants are more likely than the average American to want Biden to stay in; 45 percent say the president should continue running, but just 32 percent of evangelicals and 28 percent of Americans say the same.

Earlier this month, Biden, who is Catholic, talked about his faith while visiting a Black church in Philadelphia, where supporters came to his defense.

Just under half of Black Protestants say Biden can win in 2024.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/ViIsl

Both evangelicals (74%) and Americans (70%) overall say they aren’t confident that the 81-year-old president has the mental capacity for office, far more than those who say the same about his opponent. Fewer than a third of Black Protestants say they doubt Biden’s mental capacity.

“The fact that our elderly leaders—one struggling to put sentences together, the other ranting with insanities and profanities—won’t leave the scene is about more than an election year,” wrote CT editor in chief Russell Moore after the debate. “It’s about what it means to live in an era of diminished expectations.”

For months, Americans have expressed disapproval in the presidential candidates from the major parties. Younger voters are particularly turned off: Over 40 percent of adults under 30 have an unfavorable view of both Trump and Biden, according to Pew Research Center.

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In the poll, conducted days before last week’s assassination attempt, evangelicals were also somewhat torn on Donald Trump as a candidate. Just under half—46 percent—said he too should withdraw so his party can select a different candidate. Only a quarter of Republicans surveyed wanted Trump to be replaced on the ticket.

Evangelicals had some reservations about Trump’s character. In poll breakouts provided to CT, they were more likely to say neither candidate was honest (34%) than to describe Trump (31%) or Biden (28%) that way.

Yet most still believe he has the right vision for the country and can win the upcoming presidential election. Voters across parties agreed that Trump was more capable of winning.

Evangelicals also believe Trump is in better shape than Biden. Sixty-three percent were confident in his mental capacity.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/z6UvU

- More from Kate Shellnutt

Ideas

Put Away Your Swords

Esau McCaulley

Jesus used his final moments with his disciples before the crucifixion to heal his opponent’s ear—and model the way of love.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

In the Gospel narratives, a gaggle of soldiers came to arrest Jesus before his crucifixion. Trying to stop them, the apostle Peter brandished a sword to defend Jesus from danger but missed his target, striking one of the soldiers—ironically enough—on the ear. Jesus responded by using one of his final moments in person with his followers to teach them about the dangers of political and religious violence.

Jesus rebuked Peter with a much-quoted line: “Put your sword back in its place … for all who draw the sword will die by the sword” (Matt. 26:52). Violence, Jesus taught, only begets more violence, creating a spiral that can consume individuals, movements, and sometimes even republics.

But Jesus did more than issue a policy statement. He healed the soldier who had come to do him harm (Luke 22:51).

This same soldier and his fellow combatants would continue with the arrest, and Jesus would become a victim of state-sponsored torture and death. The healing, then, was not a commentary on the soldier’s politics. Jesus did not heal because he believed the actions against him were just. The healing was a recognition of his enemy’s humanity, for there are moments to set aside politics and to see our opponents as fellow bearers of the image of God.

In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump, we find ourselves in one of those moments. Regardless of our party affiliation, it is appropriate to lament the attack, to grieve the passing of the father in the crowd who died defending his family, and to pray for all those impacted by this unjustifiable act of violence.

But for Christians, prayers are the easy part. Being honest about the state of our nation is more difficult.

It is disingenuous for us to pretend that this was unimaginable. We have seen too much death in this country to act as if anything is beyond comprehension: We have endured gunmen shooting at school children and at worshippers in churches and synagogues; at people in night clubs, grocery stores, and college campuses; and at young Black boys out for a jog. We have lost the right to pretend that it is unthinkable that someone would aim at a politician. There is a dangerous rage that has been bubbling over in every corner of this country, and, in Pennsylvania, it overflowed on the campaign trail, with tragic results.

Political violence has long been in our rhetoric as well. Our discourse on social media is a wasteland. Talk of civil war is everywhere in the background as we view fellow citizens who disagree with us as downright evil. We’ve learned to see our political rivals as an undifferentiated mass of misfits who threaten all we hold dear—as dangers to the republic.

Do not misunderstand my point. There are high stakes in politics. There are dangerous political ideas. There are some among the populace who want to undermine democracy. Policies have real-world consequences, and now is not the time to pretend otherwise.

But not every divergent opinion rises to that level. Our friends and neighbors who disagree with us are more than a collection of all the worst ideas from the other side. Yet we’ve become strangers to one another, and in our separation, discord has flourished. It is easy to denounce violence when it finally erupts; it is harder to admit that it has been all around us for quite some time, growing in the gaps made by our alienation.

It is not easy to place the beginning of the fear that I now feel for our country. I do recall a first stirring of it while watching the inauguration of former president Barack Obama in 2009. My now-teenage son was an infant at the time, but I woke him and placed him in front of the television. I wanted to be able to say that we watched the installation of our nation’s first Black president together. I was hopeful, but also afraid that he might be assassinated.

When Obama got out of the car to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I kept thinking, Get back in that automobile. It is not safe. That feeling of fear returned to me when I first heard the news of the attempt on Trump’s life. Things are not safe in this country and have not been for a long time. Each election has felt more fraught, divisive, and even dangerous.

Is there a path out of this deadly spiral? Yes. We must renounce the violence that endangers the entire social fabric. Jesus was correct in Gethsemane when he described hatred and murder as a social contagion that spreads from person to person. It is foolish to think that a disease that infects the rest of our lives together will not make its way to our elections. A nation that cannot protect its school-age children cannot protect its presidential candidates. A nation that cannot control its virtual rage will not control its rage in the flesh.

Words are not always violence. Violence is violence, but a “good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of” (Luke 6:45).

We must begin to act like a people capable of holding free and clear elections rooted in principle and respectful, good-faith argument. All candidates must conduct the rest of their campaigns with an eye to restoring public trust. Every election is important, but the last few months of this particular race can set the tone for decades to come.

Trump, president Joe Biden, and any other third-party candidates should hold another debate in the coming weeks to give the United States the chance to see them present their vision for America. They should outline their actual plans for the country and make a case for why they deserve our votes. No more debates about who’s better at golf. The future of the republic is at stake.

Every American who cares about the future of democracy should vote, whether for one of these two or for a third-party candidate. A record turnout would reaffirm our commitment to the principles we hold dear. Even at this late stage, it would be a pledge to find a better way.

Peter was not the only early believer who used violence. Paul, who wrote a quarter of the New Testament, was involved in the killing of the first Christian martyr, Stephen (Acts 7). Paul’s change of heart occurred while he was on the way to arrest and jail even more of his then-opponents. His encounter with Jesus caused him to reject violence as a means of getting his way, and he spent the rest of his life traveling the Roman Empire to change lives without the aid of human weapons. He never converted a single person through the power of the sword. Instead, he made arguments. We need to make America argue with civility again, using data and reason—and love.

In one of Paul’s most famous passages, 1 Corinthians 13, he described love as a thing that is patient, kind, not self-seeking or boastful, not easily angered. He spoke of a love that keeps no record of wrongs. He called it the greatest of all virtues, and he had in mind the love that we might show each other as Christians (Gal. 6:10, John 13:35).

Nonetheless, love for others remains a central element of Christian teachings (Luke 10:25–37). Given the ever-rising atmosphere of hate, we would do well to recover this love as an operating principle within the church and to allow that love to spill out into the world. It might be our most important witness in this moment.

Esau McCaulley (@esaumccaulley) is the author of How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South and the children’s book Andy Johnson and the March for Justice. He is an associate professor of New Testament and public theology at Wheaton College.

- More from Esau McCaulley

Books

Hillbillies Deserve More than an Elegy

Amanda Held Opelt

VP candidate J.D. Vance’s best-selling memoir told a compelling story about my home region in Appalachia. But it was not the whole story.

J.D. Vance

Drew Angerer / Staff / Getty

On Monday, Donald Trump announced his pick for vice presidential candidate: J. D. Vance, the junior US senator from Ohio.

Some would say Vance has had a meteoric rise, from venture capitalist to best-selling author, from junior senator to VP candidate, all in less than a decade. Like most people in America, I was introduced to Vance through his book.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is Vance’s account of his tumultuous childhood growing up as the descendent of disadvantaged Appalachian hillbillies in Middletown, Ohio. It was critically acclaimed by pundits and politicians on both the left and the right and was later made into an Oscar-nominated film. Both book sales and movie streams surged this week with the news of Vance’s nomination.

When I originally read the book, I was immediately intrigued by Vance’s story. He and I are the same age, and, like Vance, I too am a product of the Appalachian diaspora. His grandparents left the mountains the same decade as mine, his to the Rust Belt of Ohio and mine to the sunshine state of Florida.

Our stories diverge because my family eventually found their way back to Appalachia. I’ve spent most of my life in rural East Tennessee and North Carolina. My immediate family also enjoyed many more economic and educational privileges than Vance. Additionally, I was blessed with more spiritual resources than Vance, who indicates his grandmother read the Bible and prayed but wasn’t involved in a local church like my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were.

But in the pages of Hillbilly Elegy, I met many characters I recognized, folks whose struggles echoed those of my neighbors, classmates, and extended family.

There is much to admire in Vance’s book: his resilience in the face of many adversities, his service to our country in the military, and his skill as a dynamic storyteller. When I first read the book back in 2017, I marveled at how well Vance was able to capture the angst of the region in which I grew up. It was like he was giving us a tour of the interior emotional world of the white working class.

And so, perhaps inadvertently, Vance became the unofficial spokesperson for “hillbillies,” and Hillbilly Elegy became the de facto textbook on Appalachia for the entire country.

Over the last eight years, however, I couldn’t help but notice that whenever I talk to my Appalachian neighbors about Hillbilly Elegy (both the book and the film), they grimace. I can see in their faces a mixed reaction to Vance’s story, like they feel both kinship and shame when they read it.

For one, the book has only 21 footnotes. Vance himself admits in the introduction that the book is not meant to be an academic evaluation of either the Rust Belt or Appalachia, that it is simply a memoir. But reading it now, after seeing the reactions of some of my neighbors, I’m concerned by the phenomenon around the book’s success.

Moreover, reading it as a Christian, as someone whose faith commands love of neighbor, I feel a deep conviction about the problematic ways we tell stories about who we perceive to be “the other” in this country. I’m also concerned about the ways people on the margins have internalized stories told about themselves.

After Vance’s book hit the bestseller list, Appalachian scholars, activists, and organizers like Elizabeth Catte, Meredith McCarroll, and Anthony Harkins began to push back. They noted that Vance’s book sometimes relies on pervasive and harmful stereotypes about “hillbillies” and “rednecks,” often blaming all of Appalachia’s ills on what he believes are the social vices (feuding, heavy drinking, clansman retribution) of the Scots-Irish culture that dominates the region.

These wise Appalachians taught me that almost every well-established stereotype that exists in this world was created and cultivated by someone who stood to gain from its proliferation. Enterprising entities, including the “local color” literary movement of the late 1800s, the coal industry, politicians, and Hollywood producers, have all profited by telling a skewed, simplistic version of Appalachia that partitions them from the mainstream.

And despite all the progress we’ve made as a society in learning about the harms of reductive stereotypes, the redneck or hillbilly trope seems still to be fair game, enduring unchecked in the American imagination. My friends and neighbors carry the heavy load of shame that comes with these stories. I’m afraid that Hillbilly Elegy, whether by intent or by accident, did too little to set the record straight.

My concern with Vance’s book is not merely with what is said but with what is left unsaid. The story of this region and its people cannot be told apart from the oppressive influence of extractive industries like coal and timber. In this way, Barbara Kingsolver’s recent Pulitzer Prize–winning Demon Copperhead serves as a better depiction of Appalachia.

Vance makes a few passing references to the declining coal industry in his book. But for most hillbillies, coal is context—not a subtext or a footnote. Coal and timber destroyed the ecological base of a mountainous region that was formerly home to austere but thriving communities built on subsistence farming, hunting, and foraging practices. When the trees were felled to be sold or make way for mines, the soil eroded, and plant and animal life disappeared.

Coal companies made it so that working for them was the only viable way to support a family. Unsafe working conditions led to countless deaths and injuries. Miners were paid in company scrip, and their families were forced to live in company housing and shop in company stores. This created a crushing monopoly, making it nearly impossible for Appalachians in coal country to build any kind of wealth outside of the company.

When the demand for coal declined, many Appalachians were left with no jobs, no wealth, black lungs, and a devastated ecosystem. Moreover, coal companies continued to own thousands and thousands of Appalachian acres, even as mines were shutting down. Because companies pay only a fraction of the taxes that citizens pay on land, there has been far less tax money pouring into Appalachian communities for infrastructure, education, and health care over the years.

Drug addiction features prominently in Vance’s book. But there is little exposition on the predatory practices of drug companies that specifically targeted Appalachia for opioid sales in the 1990s. They chose Appalachia because they knew the region was full of injured miners and blue-collar workers.

In the end, one walks away from Vance’s story with the distinct impression that the misdeeds of his kin are unique and inherent not to his family, but to hillbillies in general. After railing against the “learned helplessness” he disdains in hillbillies, Vance writes of the harmful habits of his community: “These problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them.”

But a truly inquisitive and compassionate heart can see that’s not entirely true. The lives of most people who struggle—including hillbillies—are usually defined by both personal decisions and historic injustices, injustices that I hope are not beyond the knowledge or recollection of our politicians and lawmakers.

Hillbilly Elegy is certainly a fascinating account of one person’s experience. But if we are to understand a group of people we believe to be “the other,” we must lift the discourse from the anecdotal to the comprehensive, from the illustrative to the historically rooted.

The authors of Scripture tell meticulously detailed stories, such as the lengthy narrative of Israel’s enslavement, emancipation, desert wanderings, political exploits, and eventual exile. But persistence is required if we are to truly understand the triumphs and tribulations of characters like Moses, David, Mary Magdalene, or the apostle Paul. The Bible shows us that a person’s life is not merely made up of the sum of their own choices, but by a generations-long story that undergirds any given moment.

This long view of a person or people group’s history inspires in us the grace we need to love our neighbors well. Jesus made it a point to live alongside those he loved and to step into their stories. In Matthew 9, as Jesus traveled through towns and villages, he met people, healed them, and experienced their struggles. “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (v. 36).

In a world of political discourse that is descending from divisiveness to chaos, from vitriol to violence, we need the patient, informed compassion that Jesus demonstrated. We need a capacity for long stories and sweeping narratives. We need to be willing to excavate a person’s story, all the way down to the deeper, historical, and ancestral tipping points that created the context for their life. In so doing, we better understand why our fellow citizens feel the way they feel and vote the way they vote. Facts must inform us, not stereotypes.

Appalachia is not a monolith. Neither are Black urban neighborhoods or Midwestern farming communities. If we are to love those who we perceive to be different from us, we must be willing to believe that their stories sometimes transcend our meager understanding of them. I, for one, am ready for my hillbilly neighbors to no longer be typecast for someone else’s gain, but to internalize a better story about themselves.

And so, perhaps, hillbillies don’t need elegies. Appalachia is not dead. God is at work here, in small churches that still meet on hillsides and “hollers,” in faith-based drug rehab centers, in food pantries, and in nonprofits working to reclaim and repurpose pilfered ecology through the care of creation.

More than elegies, we need protest songs, like the ones penned by the widows of coal miners and by Cherokee descendants weeping for the land’s loss of health. We need songs of lament, like the ones sung by the Israelites in exile, like the psalms, and like the mournful banjo-picked tunes that have sounded from the front porches of these mountains for generations. The Bible can certainly offer a tutorial on how to write such songs.

And I pray candidate Vance remembers that more than a death dirge, hillbillies need a proper Appalachian ballad. We need a hopeful and triumphant chorus that reminds us that a brighter future is possible if we rightly remember our past; a ballad that pays tribute to the resilience of a region that has always defied its most insidious stereotypes.

Amanda Held Opelt is a speaker, songwriter, and author of the book A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing.

- More from Amanda Held Opelt

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