Bangladeshi Christians and Hindus Advocate for a Secular Country

Rishabh Jain - Religion News Service and Surinder Kaur

As political changes loom and minority communities face violence, religious minorities urge the government to remove Islam as the state religion.

Amid a spike in violence against religious minorities in Bangladesh, a national council of Buddhists, Hindus and Christians is renewing a campaign for the Muslim-majority South Asian nation to remove Islam as the state religion.

In mid-July, student-led protests demanding reform of the country’s job quota system turned violent, culminating in the collapse of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government on August 5. After Hasina’s resignation, the anger aimed at her government poured onto religious minorities, especially Hindus and members of Hasina’s party, the secular Awami League, which is backed by much of the Hindu community. Furthermore, mobs targeted Christian homes and churches, and Christian converts from Islam reported death threats.

The attacks on minorities’ homes, places of worship, businesses, and lives, as well as Awami League politicians, have resulted in the death of at least 650 people since the violence began, according to a report by the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

The Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council (BHBCUC), a human rights organization, argues that enshrining Islam as the state religion has been detrimental to the country’s religious minorities and aspirations for greater democratic rule.

“According to the communalist and fundamentalist forces, Islam does not coexist with other religious faiths and beliefs and also contradicts democracy, in which they have no belief,” said Monindra Kumar Nath, the council’s joint general secretary.

Nirmal Rozario, president of the Bangladesh Christian Association (BCA) and the Christian co-president of the BHBCUC, said that the Christian community has advocated strongly for a secular country. The BCA presented 10 demands to the previous government in 2016 and “‘secularism’ has always been on the list,” Rozario told CT.

The council said earlier this month that there were 1,045 cases of human rights violations against religious minorities between June and August. Council members, including Nath, have received death threats for their activism. Nath called the reestablishment of “a discrimination-free state” a dream “dreamt by the recent student movement,” and one the BHBCUC will keep fighting for.

Six churches were seriously attacked during these two months, including the Naogaon Church of Bangladesh, Rangpur Isse Church (which serves Muslim converts), Chapai Lutheran Church, and two Pentecostal Church of Bangladesh congregations, Bony Baroi, the executive director at Bangladesh Social Service (BSS) and senior pastor at Bangladesh Evangelical Revival Church, confirmed to CT.

The house of a Muslim-background pastor was ransacked and looted by a fundamentalist Islamic group, a source who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons told CT.

“He was instrumental in bringing several people to Christ and runs eight house churches. He was translating the Bible into their native language for the believers, but all his translation work was burnt by the mob that attacked him,” said the source. “All his belongings, including chickens and ducks, were looted and his house and furniture were broken.”

A Catholic priest told La Croix that small churches and Christian villages were attacked during the riots.

The BHBCUC, an interethnic and interreligious forum, was established by Maj. Gen. C.R. Dutta Bir Uttam, a veteran of Bangladesh’s guerrilla war for independence from Pakistan that occurred in 1971 and was fought by people of different faiths, including Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, and Hindus.

After the war, in 1972, architects of Bangladesh’s constitution included secularism alongside nationalism, socialism, and democracy as the country’s four founding principles. But a few years later, the first president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, known as the “father of the nation” and Hasina’s actual father, was overthrown and a military ruler, Ziaur Rahman, replaced secularism with “absolute trust and faith in the Almighty Allah.” His successor Hussain Muhammad Ershad, another military officer, officially made Islam the state religion through a change to the constitution.

Activists have since demanded the removal of this establishment of a state religion, but despite Ershad’s fall in 1990, successive governments have kept the status quo, including those led by the Awami League. In 2011, a constitutional reform restored the original four founding principles, including secularism, but Hasina and others’ conception of secularism included a state Islam that would also guarantee religious freedom.

Under this system, religious minority leaders say they face discrimination and many hurdles that prevent them from practicing their faith freely. They feel strongly that democratic states should be secular states.

“The Christian community of Bangladesh dreams of living in a peaceful, prosperous, secular state where churches can worship openly and freely, public holidays will be available on special religious festivals and religious activities will not face any harassment or obstruction,” Jenny Moushumi Adhikary, Women and Children Coordinator of Talitha Koumi, an evangelical ministry in Bangladesh, told CT. “If we show respect and honor to people of all creeds, we can expect the same respect from the country and government.”

During this season of political unrest, Christians from all denominations have met at the Catholic archbishop’s house to regularly meet and pray for “peace, protection, wisdom and social justice to be established,” said Baroi.

This community is currently forming a Christian team that will seek to visit the interim government’s Chief Adviser, Mohammad Yunus, to discuss issues such as the “protection of minorities, Christian development organizations and the situation of the religious institutions,” Baroi said. This group intends to lobby alongside the BHBCUC in their efforts to make Bangladesh a secular state.

“The Christian community has always shown solidarity and stood by the BHBCUC—whether through demonstrations, human chains or demands,” said Rozario.

Last September, the BHBCUC launched a hunger strike to hold the Awami League to its election promises, which included proposing legislation that would allow Hindus to reclaim confiscated property, the creation of a national minority commission, protection for religious minorities, and the reinstatement of employment quotas that would distribute government jobs more equally across faiths.

The Bangladesh Youth Unity Council, a student-led organization, wants the international community to remind the interim government of its obligation to protect its citizens, irrespective of religion and ethnic identity.

“Whoever comes to power should establish a minorities commission and a ministry for religious and ethnic minorities,” said the youth council’s secretary, who requested anonymity out of concern for his safety. “They should give land rights to everyone and there should be a special tribunal to protect religious minorities.”

Communications laws, such as the Digital Security Act, are used to single out members of minority faiths, especially Hindus, for “offending the religious sentiments” of the Muslim majority. Courts have also imposed stricter penalties on religious minorities accused of posting offensive content on Facebook.

“The Christian community does not feel the freedom to express themselves on social media platforms out of fear of repercussions,” Rozario noted.

The Youth Unity Council’s secretary added that after Hasina fled earlier this month, the movement to remove Islam as the state religion in Bangladesh is at square one. “The mob rule on the streets right now has made it clear that they don’t want religious minorities in Bangladesh,” he said. “They want only one single religion, which is Islam.”

The international community, including the United Nations and the US State Department, has called for the protection of minorities in Bangladesh.

“We have made it clear that our goal is to ensure that the recent violence in Bangladesh is de-escalated. We are firmly against any racially driven attacks or incitement to such violence,” said Farhan Haq, the deputy spokesperson for United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, in an August 8 statement.

Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington, said removing Islam as a state religion would significantly improve the interim government’s relationship with India, which has called on Bangladesh to protect its religious minorities in hopes of preventing Hindu refugees from coming across the border.

But Kugelman cautioned that dropping Islam’s favored status is not a simple fix, and he does not foresee it happening.

“Simply removing Islam as a state religion would not mean that influential religious and particularly Islamist actors would go away,” he added. “On the contrary, they would become more emboldened.”

While “some are demanding to rewrite the constitution,” the Chief Adviser does not have the power to do so and a constitutional change can only “be done by an elected government,” emphasized Asa Kain, the superintendent of the Bangladesh Assemblies of God denomination.

Rozario of the BHBCUC explained that their organization submitted seven demands to then–Prime Minister Hasina in 2023, “which included the demand for a secular Bangladesh. We had expectations from her, but our demands were not considered. Our demands and stance remain the same with regard to the future government.”

Yunus, who is also a Nobel laureate, recently showed support for minorities by visiting Dhakeshwari Temple, a prominent state-owned Hindu site in Dhaka considered the country’s national temple.

He urged Bangladeshis to be patient before assessing his government’s performance, according to local media.

“In our democratic aspirations, we should not be seen as Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists, but as human beings,” Yunus said, according to The Daily Star, the largest English-language daily newspaper in Bangladesh. “Our rights should be ensured. The root of all problems lies in the decay of institutional arrangements. That is why such issues arise. Institutional arrangements need to be fixed.”

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Books

Review

Take Me Out to Something Bigger Than a Ballgame

Paul Putz

American stadiums have always played host both to major sports and to larger social aspirations.

Charles Gullung / Getty

In 1929, a Kansas preacher named Charles Sheldon had to get something off his chest.

Best known as the author of In His Steps (1896)—a novel that encouraged Christians to ask, “What would Jesus do?”—Sheldon reflected on a recent experience during a stormy winter night in Topeka. Most of the town was shut down that evening. But there was one exception: the local college’s basketball arena. There, the scheduled game took place, and fans packed the gymnasium to the rafters.

“I couldn’t help wondering,” Sheldon mused in an article for Christian Herald, “how many church members would be in the fifty different churches at a prayer meeting on a night like that, and paying a dollar apiece for the privilege of going.”

Sheldon’s question was less a rallying cry for change than a sigh of resignation. This was simply the way it was. Sure, plenty of Americans still attended their local congregations on Sundays. But given a choice, Americans were more interested in the thrill and excitement of sporting spectacles than the weekly activities of church life.

Historian Frank Guridy makes no mention of Sheldon in his remarkable new book, The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play. Still, he fills in the contours of the new reality that Sheldon seemed to recognize: In the 20th century, sporting spaces were increasingly central to Americans’ shared life together, emerging as sanctuaries where people could form bonds of community, express their identities, and experience something close to the feeling of transcendence.

They were, in other words, the sort of places where people would brave blizzard conditions on a wintry December night, just to enter the door and be witnesses.

‘Palaces of pleasure’ and ‘arenas of protest’

A professor of history at Columbia University and director of the Eric H. Holder Jr. Initiative for Civil and Political Rights, Guridy did not begin his career as a sports historian. His first book, the award-winning Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (2010), established him as a leading scholar of the Black Freedom Movement in the United States and the Caribbean.

With his second book, he turned his attention to sports, producing The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics (2021). His background and expertise gave him a vantage point to see and understand sports as a cultural phenomenon, with an eye toward the broader social and political meanings bound up in the games we play.

In The Stadium, Guridy continues this line of inquiry, weaving sports history with economics and politics, culture and geography, race and class, gender and sexuality. “Stadiums,” he writes, “make possible the spectacular staging of a society’s ideologies and self-perceptions.”

Guridy sweeps through American history as he explores those “ideologies and self-perceptions” from the late 19th century to the present. Throughout, he emphasizes a core tension at the heart of the stadium’s presence in American culture. “Elites have constructed stadiums as monuments to affluence, technological wonder, and exclusivity,” he writes. “Yet, America’s marginalized groups have transformed them into venues to express their desires and discontents, and to proclaim a more inclusive vision of American society.”

While Guridy’s narrative is soaring in scope, he also shows a careful eye for granular detail. He describes the physical landscape and the shifting architecture, aesthetics, and design of stadiums. He explores the human experience of the stadium too, including the sights, sounds, and smells that Americans would have encountered when they clicked through the turnstiles. And he identifies particular places in specific cities as anchor points for his narrative—symbols of the broader themes he tries to illustrate.

He begins with New York City, where he describes the evolution of stadiums and arenas from temporary wooden structures to permanent buildings like Madison Square Garden, made of concrete and steel and designed for mass spectacles. Although often created to be “palaces of pleasure” owned by the rich and wealthy, by the 1920s these sites drew fans across classes and from immigrant populations, serving as “arenas of protest” where people could articulate competing visions of American identity.

From there he moves to New Orleans, where Tulane Stadium, host of college football’s Sugar Bowl from the 1930s to the 1970s, served as a “monument to white supremacy.” Guridy shows how the annual Sugar Bowl spectacle helped to project and protect the South’s system of segregation and racial hierarchy until the civil rights activism of the 1960s finally brought it down.

Next, Guridy goes west to California, focusing on Los Angeles Coliseum. Guridy’s attention turns to the ways stadiums helped to nurture Black identity and expression, with African Americans helping to “make the stadium into a semipublic square where they could voice their aspirations for justice and equality.” The chapter culminates with a vivid description of the Wattstax concert held at Los Angeles Coliseum in 1972—an “unapologetic expression of black politics and black pleasure.”

Guridy’s chapter on Los Angeles marks a turning point in his narrative. While the first two chapters tend to highlight exclusion and hierarchy, chapters 3 through 6 generally portray mid-century stadiums as more democratic spaces that promoted greater inclusion. To Guridy, this change occurred, in part, because of a gradual shift in stadium and arena ownership from private to public hands. As a result, he argues, stadiums became more responsive to the demands of activists and people on the margins seeking to claim a place of belonging.

Of course, the stadium remained contested terrain for competing visions of society. Inclusion for some did not necessarily translate to inclusion for others. Guridy emphasizes this point in a chapter on Washington, DC, where the construction of DC Stadium in the 1960s—publicly financed and governed—cultivated a more diverse fanbase while also forcing Washington Redskins owner George Marshall to end his practice of segregation. Yet, as Guridy shows, this did not eliminate the team’s use of racist Native American stereotypes and tropes in its name, mascot, and rituals.

Even while giving attention to these ongoing examples of exclusion, Guridy still sees the mid-century stadium as a place of surprising democratic possibility, including for gender and sexuality. One particularly fascinating chapter explores the “gendered geography” of the stadium, with a focus on the locker room and press box as sites of male dominance. Guridy traces and analyzes the efforts of female sportswriters to claim a space within the stadium for carrying out their work and having a voice in the story of sports in America.

He also spends a chapter on LGBTQ inclusion, using the Gay Games, held in San Francisco in 1982 and 1986, to highlight the efforts of gay and lesbian communities to make their presence felt and voice heard in American society.

The good vibes of the mid-century stadium, in Guridy’s telling, did not last. With chapter 7, his narrative takes another turn, with stadiums transformed from an “institution that largely accommodated America’s marginalized peoples between the 1960s and the 1980s” into a “corporate temple of exclusion.”

Guridy sees Oriole Park at Camden Yards, completed in 1992 as the home for the Baltimore Orioles, as emblematic of the new era. Unlike multipurpose stadiums designed for both baseball and football and managed by the public, the ballpark at Camden was designed for a single sport and placed in Baltimore’s downtown area. It was supposed to have a “retro” look and feel, evoking feelings of nostalgia while helping to revitalize neighborhoods and communities near the stadium.

Instead, the new craze for stadiums patterned after Oriole Park led to greater social stratification and further gentrified inner-city neighborhoods. The best seats and luxury experiences were set aside for corporate partners and affluent fans, who could drive in from wealthy enclaves, while working-class people who lived near the stadium were priced out of actually enjoying the game day experience.

“Commerce and consumption,” Guridy laments, “displaced the stadium’s historic role as a venue of public recreation and civic engagement.”

An additional final chapter highlights another worry for Guridy: the rise of militarized patriotism at the ballpark. Guridy charts the response after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when the stadium quickly moved from serving as a space for collective mourning to hosting a proliferation of patriotic rituals (some paid for by the US government) that glorified the military and law enforcement. As part of this trend, the national anthem became more entrenched as an essential part of the spectacle and experience of sporting events.

Yet Guridy notes that the potential for contested meanings remained. Protests for racial justice during the national anthem, represented most dramatically by NFL player Colin Kaepernick, challenged the enforced conformity expected during the patriotic stadium rituals. Guridy sees the rise of athlete-activists like Kaepernick, as well as the use of stadiums as voting sites in 2020, as signs that the “historic civic function” of the stadium is still in play today.

A surprising omission

As a work of history, Guridy’s book is truly impressive. The breadth and depth of his research and analysis shines through, and his writing is compelling—and also full of surprises shaped by his curiosity. Guridy writes not as a detached academic, but as a sports fan too, someone who truly understands the religious-like allure of the stadium. He gives his attention not just to splashy moments and events but also to small, behind-the-scenes details, like the history of the ballpark organist. In this book, the stadium comes alive, sparkling with fascinating details and soaring ideas about its meaning and significance in American life and culture.

At the same time, readers of Christianity Today will rightly wonder where they fit in the story Guridy tells. For as much care as he takes looking at the meaning of the stadium from a variety of angles, his narrative can at times fit too easily into a simple binary: Those on the side of progressive politics are the good guys, and those with conservative politics are the bad guys.

The biggest gap, however, is the lack of attention to religion. Other than scattered references here and there to religious figures (like Jesse Jackson) or movements (like the Christian Right), there is no sustained analysis about how religious groups have made use of the stadium.

This strikes me as a surprising omission, given how central religion has been as a source of identity for Americans and how important the stadium has been to religious movements and groups throughout American history—including Catholics, Jews, Latter-day Saints, and, yes, evangelical Protestants.

For evangelicals, the stadium is an especially important place. For Charles Sheldon, it may have been a competitor for time and attention. But from Billy Sunday to Billy Graham, it has also served as a site for revival, where Americans have been urged to receive new life in Christ—not just for their sake, evangelists have claimed, but for the sake of the nation itself.

It has also provided a backdrop to prove the cultural relevance of the evangelical faith. The spread of stadium revivals across the United States in the 1940s and 1950s—often featuring sports stars offering their testimonials—helped to “mainstream” a movement that saw itself on the margins of cultural respectability. In the decades since, stadiums have helped to nurture and cultivate an evangelical movement within sports that has turned the playing field into one of the most evangelical-friendly spaces in American popular culture today.

Stadiums have also been a space where evangelicals have sought to promote particular visions of gender and race. In the 1990s, the Promise Keepers movement, founded by a football coach, swept through stadiums across the country, urging men to embrace leadership roles in their homes while also encouraging racial reconciliation.

No doubt Guridy encountered examples like this throughout his research, and every author has to leave important themes on the cutting room floor. But it’s precisely because of Guridy’s skill as a historian that I would have loved to see him explore the religious side of the stadium experience in more depth.

Even so, The Stadium remains an essential read and a book of lasting importance for anyone interested in exploring the deeper social meanings of American sports. Guridy shows with clarity and insight that stadiums are “inextricable parts of American social, political, and cultural life”—and that they will continue to mirror and reflect the debates, tensions, and developments in American society in the years ahead.

Paul Putz is director of Truett Seminary’s Faith & Sports Institute at Baylor University. He is the author of The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports.

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Church Life

Boomers: Serve Like Your Whole Life Is Ahead of You

Donald Sweeting

What will our generation do with the increased life expectancy God has blessed us with?

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

Not long ago, I visited my 99-year-old father and 97-year-old mother. My dad had just passed his driver’s test again, and a year before that, he published yet another book. He told me he wants to take up painting again. Then, with a mischievous look in his eye, my dad turned to me, a 60-something baby boomer, and said, “Son, what are you going to do with yourself? You’ve got your whole life ahead of you!”

A hundred years ago, this kind of comment would have seemed nonsensical. But the fact is, a massive demographic shift is taking place in our country, and Americans today are living longer than ever.

Life expectancy in the US increased from 47.3 to 78.7 years between 1900 and 2010. Sixty-five and older happens to be the fastest-growing age group in the US population today. In fact, the US Census Bureau predicts that by 2034 the US will have more people over 65 than under 18. Think about that: For the first time in US history, older people will outnumber younger people.

This is partly due to the size of the baby boomer generation and the declining US birth rate, but it’s also because advances in health care, public health, and nutrition have increased lifespans beyond historic norms.

US hospitals and universities are now referring to the 65-plus life stage as the period of “late adulthood,” which they divide into three stages: the young-old (65–84), the oldest-old (85–99), and the centenarians (100+). The young-old stage is considered the “golden years” of adulthood with fewer responsibilities, relatively good health, and meaningful social engagement.

Though Gen Zers may soon pass them in number, boomers continue to make up a growing number of the US workforce. In 2020, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 10.8 million people, or 19 percent, of those 65 and older were still employed. In popular culture we are hearing some suggest that 60 is the new 40 and 80 is the new 60. People are talking about the 60-year career instead of the traditional 40-year career.

This is due, in part, to employers’ desires to retain experienced workers and many boomers’ desire to keep working. For others, it may be a matter of financial necessity—they may want to retire to spend more time with family, travel, or serve in ministry, but they can’t afford to. Whatever the reason, older people today are working longer than in previous generations, which could have far-reaching consequences on the workforce and economy.

This also impacts the political realm, where most politicians today are older than their predecessors have been. In this election season, we almost had a rematch between a 78-year-old Republican nominee and an 81-year-old Democratic nominee, who responded to public pressure and stepped down.

Of course, this trend is not always appreciated by the younger generation, who sometimes criticize boomers for not passing the baton or relinquishing their positions of control. But the fact is, most of my peers are struggling to determine the right age to retire. Many still see retirement as something that happens in our 60s, while some anticipate another 20-plus years of full-time employment ahead.

But regardless of when we decide to stop full-time work, we dare not neglect the new opportunities for ministry in our families, communities, and churches in the latter years of our lives. If we are wise, we must consider how we can serve the Lord and his kingdom in the extra years he has graciously given us.

For one, our schools, churches, and ministries will need to adjust to this new reality. Christian colleges and seminaries would do well to rethink their educational tracks and start favoring the nontraditional adult learner. Perhaps our concept of education should be reconceived as not simply a one-time initial infusion but a lifelong endeavor.

In recent decades, many churches have focused their outreach efforts on reaching the young at the expense of losing older congregants. But perhaps pastors should instead be helping older members by finding meaningful outlets for them to serve and utilize their gifts and experience.

Recent research shows that 1 in 4 pastors plan to retire before 2030. Yet perhaps churches should think differently about ministerial retirement—providing pathways for older clergy to re-deploy and remain fruitful in a new capacity that is more appropriate for their stage of life.

For some boomers, the 40-year ministry is expanding to a 60-year ministry. Think, for instance, of some of the most prominent evangelical leaders of recent history.

Carl F. H. Henry (1913–2003), the well-known theologian chosen to be the founding editor of Christianity Today, retired from teaching at age 85 but continued to write, lecture, and serve on boards until his death at age 90.

Vernon Grounds (1914–2010), Baptist pastor and theologian from Denver Seminary, also served as a contributing editor of Christianity Today. He had an amazing 70 years in ministry as an academic dean, president, and chancellor of the seminary before dying at 96.

John Stott (1921–2011), the well-known Anglican preacher and Bible scholar and cofounder of the Lausanne movement, began his ministry in 1945 in the church of his childhood, All Souls Langham Place, in downtown London. He served at that same church for more than 60 years as curate, rector, and rector emeritus, ending his public ministry at age 86 before passing away at 90 years old.

Billy Graham (1918–2018), one of the most important Christian leaders of the 20th century—whose vision led to the founding of Christianity Today—began his ministry with Youth for Christ in 1944. He kept serving well into his 90s, preaching his last sermon at age 96 and holding his last official crusade in 2005 when he was 97. He died at the ripe old age of 99.

J. I. Packer (1926–2020), the evangelical Anglican theologian and author who was an executive editor at Christianity Today, had a ministry that lasted 62 years before his death at 93.

And most recently, Charles Stanley (1932–2023) was the senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Atlanta for nearly 50 years and continued to preach in the pulpit until he passed away at the age of 90.

My own father, George Sweeting (b. 1924)—who for years was associated with The Moody Church and the Moody Bible Institute as pastor, president, and chancellor—continued to serve part-time at his local church, leading the senior adult ministries into his 80s and early 90s.

All these great evangelical leaders have something in common: They loved God and kept serving, exemplifying the new longevity of a 60-year career. By contrast, Thomas Aquinas died at the age of 49. John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards passed away at 54. George Whitefield only lived to age 55 and Charles Spurgeon to age 57. Martin Luther and Dwight Moody were gone by age 62.

While we rest in the sovereignty of the God who numbers our days, we are also called to be responsible as good stewards of the bodies and minds he has given us by cultivating good habits.

A recent Boston University study reports that 70 percent of longevity is driven by our “health behaviors.” These include things like staying physically active, avoiding destructive habits like smoking and excessive drinking, maintaining a healthy weight and diet, staying intellectually active, sleeping consistently, and having a strong social network.

When Vernon Grounds was asked about the secret of his longevity and long-term vocational ministry, he often talked about what he called “the three Gs”: God, genes, and the gym. He began with God because the Bible makes it clear that our lives—and every year we have on this earth—are entirely gifts from God. He didn’t buy the common American retirement narrative of work till 60 and then spend the rest of your life near a golf course.

Grounds did not believe in retiring from active service. He said he already had a great retirement plan called heaven. He cherished scriptures like Psalm 92, which speaks about the righteous who “flourish like the palm tree and grow like a cedar in Lebanon. … They still bear fruit in old age; they are ever full of sap and green” (vv. 12, 14, ESV).

While the Bible does not say much about retirement specifically, there are plenty of examples of people who never retired from serving God—those who flourished and bore fruit late in life. Think of Abram, whom God called at the age of 75. Moses was 80 when he led the Israelites out of Egypt, and Caleb was 85 when he entered the Promised Land. Or think of Anna, the 84+-year-old prophetess who finally saw Jesus, and Simeon, whom God promised would meet the Messiah before he died.

None of us knows how long we will live—as only the Lord knows the length of our days (Ps. 37:18). But the proposal I make to my fellow boomers and to the generation that follows is that we need to adjust our thinking. We should plan to live wiser, serve longer, and retire later. Why? Because God has providentially given us the gift of extra years and, as my dad said, “You’ve got your whole life ahead of you!”

Donald Sweeting serves as chancellor of Colorado Christian University.

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Ideas

Public School Can Be a Training Ground for Faith

Stefani McDade

My daughter will wrestle with worldliness in her education, just as I did. That’s why I want to be around to help.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

Depending on your circles, mentioning “public school” may elicit strong reactions. Many Christians in America avidly allege its degeneracy, while many others fiercely defend its merits. And although this debate isn’t new, it has come back to the foreground of our public life in recent years.

Last month, for example, a video went around in which actor Kirk Cameron described Christian parents who send their children to public school as “subcontract[ing their] parenting and discipleship out to the government,” warning them to expect “little Marxists, little statists, little atheists, drag queens, strippers, drug dealers … you name it.”

By contrast, writer Jen Wilkin has made faith-led arguments in favor of public education, citing benefits for children including a more diverse socialization, a healthy exposure to different worldviews, and fulfilling the call of being a Christian witness in the world. “Our participation in the public school system was directly related to loving our neighbors,” she said in a Gospel Coalition debate on the issue.

As a new school year starts with an election underway, I think the Christian case for public schooling is worth revisiting—not only because it’s a pressing conversation right now but because it prompts us to examine how we think about education, discipleship, and the faithfulness of God.

First, though, I want to recognize this is a practical question as much as a theoretical one. We ultimately make our decisions based on the actual situation, options, and children before us. That means we’re not talking about “public school” in general, but the specific public schools in our districts—and the specific private, Christian, and/or homeschool resources in our areas. And we’re not talking about kids in general, but our specific kids—and we all know that every child has different needs. So, take all that follows with the recognition that it may not be possible for you to make the same decision I would.

Our daughter is just a toddler, so she’s not in school yet, and it’s possible something in the next few years will lead us to change our minds. But, for now, my husband and I have decided to send her to public school.

One of the most important considerations for me in making that choice is that studies show there are more important elements for building and safeguarding our kids’ faith than the school they attend. As I’ve previously reported for CT, research suggests that taking children to church regularly matters more than finding the “right” school.

In fact, as I discovered two years ago in my interview with Christian public health expert Tyler VanderWeele, director of Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, childhood church attendance is one of the highest predictors of overall wellbeing as an adult. Though homeschooling provided some unique benefits, researchers found, there was very little difference, across a host of outcomes, between public and private school kids.

Another major consideration is that I would rather most of my child’s first close encounters of the worldly kind happen while she’s still under my roof, not after she leaves home. That preference is informed by my own unique educational background.

Growing up, my parents’ ministry positions moved our family around a lot. I started in public school for kindergarten and first grade, switched to a private Christian school for second and third grade, was homeschooled from fourth through sixth grade, and then returned to public school for middle and high school. Then I chose to attend the private Christian university where my parents worked at the time.

While researching this piece, I asked my parents how they had made their schooling decisions each time they moved. They said they’d weighed the quality of available education against the influence of the local atmosphere—pretty much as most parents do. And it wasn’t until I was approaching high school, they said, that warnings against the “dangers” of public education really started to influence their Christian circles.

Looking back, my experience at Christian school was mediocre, whereas I enjoyed homeschooling and saw its benefits. That said, it set me up for a massive culture shock when I went from homeschooling in Miami to public school in Washington State. We moved halfway through my sixth grade—possibly the worst time to transition from one end of the country to the other, from a Christian homeschool bubble to a secular outpost, from a setting of urban diversity to suburban homogeneity. Most of my time in middle school was spent figuring out how to fit in.

By the time we moved to Northern California, where I began high school, I was faring far better socially, culturally, and academically. But, there, a new obstacle arose, one I’d only gotten a taste of in middle school: I was bullied for my faith at school.

There was a group of boys, and even a couple teachers, who often teased me for my faith. Once in class, for example, we were reading a passage from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and came to this line: “Or you may be such a thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights and sounds.” My teacher interrupted to say, “Like you, Stefani.” The same teacher signed my yearbook, “You have a great brain. Don’t be hindered by dogma.”

Now, I know I did myself no favors in how I responded—due to my strong personality, deeply ingrained convictions, and ministry upbringing—but it was bullying all the same. It was, at times, rather miserable. But it was also motivating.

I look back on that time now as pivotal for my spiritual formation. Until then, I’d mostly been living under my parents’ faith; it was something I just took for granted. I didn’t know how to articulate my beliefs because I’d never had to defend them.

Once I was regularly provoked at school, I had to learn why I believed what I believed. I had to make my faith my own. With my parents’ guidance, I began reading apologetics books so I would know how to respond when someone attacked my views. That decision began a trajectory that led to who and where I am today, serving as theology editor at CT.

It’s worth noting that I attended high school from 2003 to 2007, near the height of fervor around New Atheism. That context, especially in California, made it socially acceptable in my school to openly mock Christianity and anyone who identified with it. But children in most public schools probably wouldn’t have the same experience today. New Atheism has fallen out of style, and some recent research has shown that vitriol toward religion generally and Christians specifically has significantly declined over the last decade or so.

And though bullying is terrible, and no parent wants their children to experience it, keeping children out of public school doesn’t guarantee they’ll never be bullied—while putting them in public school may give you the opportunity to guide them through this and other early challenges to their faith. You can remind them of what is true about themselves and what God says about them.

Think of it like strength training: Your children need to build muscles of faith, and public school can provide weight to lift while you’re around to spot them. Let them wrestle with worldly counternarratives to God’s truth while they’re still under your care. That may feel risky, but the alternative—keeping them sheltered, then letting them be exposed to everything all at once when they leave home for work or college—is risky too.

Christians are called to be “children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation” (Phil. 2:15), and we also know how seriously Jesus takes harm against children and how gravely he judges those who fail to treat them with the proper dignity. Anyone who despises a child or causes one to stumble is better off drowning in the depths of the sea (Matt. 18:1–6) than facing the wrath of God for their actions.

As parents, we can’t permanently protect our children from the world and its influences; and at the very least, they’ll encounter the worldliness of our own sin. Nor can we protect them from the inevitable and necessary struggle to truly understand and claim their faith for their own. The only question is when they’ll face that challenge and who will be around them when they do. As a mother, I want to be there—in person, every day—when those questions first come up for my kid.

That presence isn’t just about talking apologetics or exploring Scripture together, which we could do over phone or email after my daughter leaves home. It includes many other things we as parents can do to help our kids and their faith flourish: maintain a good marriage, attend to their physical and emotional needs, raise them in a healthy church environment, and practice the faith we preach.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still worried about what could happen to my daughter at public school. But my worries are more about her physical safety (especially when school shootings happen an hour away) than her exposure to people and ideas that might cause her to wrestle with her faith, values, or sense of self—even at a young age. And that’s not only because I know I’ll be there to guide her through the pitfalls of our fallen world. It’s because I trust God’s sovereignty far more than my control over my daughter’s future.

Much of the rhetoric urging Christian disengagement from public education in America has to do with the larger question of how Christians should interact with the broader culture—with what it means to be “in the world but not of it.”

That saying is a paraphrase from Jesus’ high priestly prayer at the Last Supper: “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one” (John 17:15). It comes after his warning to his followers that “in this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (16:33). And it’s not the only time he said the world would be hostile to Christians. “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves,” he said when commissioning his 12 disciples for ministry. “Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves. Be on your guard” (Matt. 10:16–17).

That hostility is the reality in which we parent as Christians, and that tension of witness and holiness, shrewdness and innocence is what we must faithfully navigate, whatever schooling decision we make. It’s a dance of both entrusting our kids to God and knowing that God has entrusted them to us. And it’s a dance we don’t undertake lightly, for at the end of all days, we will be held accountable for how we performed.

Stefani McDade is the theology editor at Christianity Today.

- More from Stefani McDade

Books

Excerpt

Being a Church of Good Repute

J. A. Medders and Doug Logan Jr.

We reach our neighbors by both demonstrating and declaring the Good News.

Edits by CT / Source Image: Unsplash

The church desperately needs both good gospel works and good gospel workers for the Good News message. The apostle in his letter to Titus makes a clear connection between faith and practice. Why is this so important? Our faithful obedience to God’s word ensures that “in everything,” we can “adorn the doctrine of God our Savior” (Titus 2:10, ESV throughout).

Evangelistic churches know the place of good works in Good News proclamation. Because Jesus has cleansed us and made us his own, we’re to be “zealous for good works” (2:14). There should be a zeal and longing for Christians to do good in their communities.

Jesus wants his churches to be people who “learn to devote themselves to good works” (3:14). Paul uses the word learn because it’s not natural for us to do good works. Our nature is selfish, cynical, and judgmental. Even in our new born-again nature, we have to learn how to be good-works-doing people. The only way we learn is to look to God’s word and to God’s Word—to the Scriptures and, supremely, to the Son of God whom they reveal.

When we read the Gospels, we see Jesus’ humility, patience, and urgency to spread his kingdom. He does this by word and works.

It is striking that right after the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7), Jesus demonstrates the power of the gospel through good deeds connected to the Good News. Jesus wrapped up this sermon and immediately showed compassion to a leper and healed him (8:1–4). When a Roman soldier asked Jesus to heal his servant, he did (v. 5–13). He fed thousands, healed hundreds, raised people from the dead, and gave time to those whom police officers today classify as “living a high-risk lifestyle.” Jesus demonstrated the kingdom of God even as he declared it.

There are two dangers to avoid when it comes to mercy ministry and evangelism. First, we must not treat mercy ministry as the same as, or as a valid alternative to, evangelism. People need to hear about Jesus crucified and risen to be saved. We pray people will say, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner”—it is not enough for them to say, “Lord, your people are good people and make an impact on this community” (though that is a good start).

But second, we must not treat mercy ministry as optional or as a distraction from the real work of the church. It was vital to Jesus’ ministry, and must be to us. If it weren’t, he would have just preached about repentance and salvation and would never have taken time to tell us a parable about a good Samaritan helping his dying enemy as instructive for loving our neighbors.

Yes, the accomplishment of redemption and the proclamation of the gospel are the major notes of Christ’s ministry. He came to destroy the devil’s works, give himself as a ransom for many, and proclaim good news to the captives. But the minor keys—essential to his music—are his works of mercy. These acts of mercy flow from the heart of Jesus for people. We must maintain that doing good works is itself good.

The fourth-century Roman emperor Julian, who was pagan and vehemently opposed to Christianity, “became fearful that Christianity might take over the Roman Empire … as a result of the good works of Christians,” writes David Gustafson. Christians in Rome were supporting thousands of needy people per day. They established hospitals, food programs, and orphanages. Their love for the community was clear and tangible.

Many people in our communities are averse to going to church or even talking about Christianity—and, often, their reticence is because of Christians. Public scandals involving people who claim to be Christians have soured unbelievers toward us. Media outlets and Hollywood often give a poor representation of the church. Social media adds fuel to the fire. We’re misrepresented by celebrities and best-selling authors who claim to be for Jesus but are clearly self-focused. And, let’s be honest, we ourselves are sometimes guilty of leaving people with a very wrong impression of what Jesus wants his church to be.

That’s why it’s crucial for local churches to prepare the ground around them—to do good works so that people might be ready to receive the Good News. And good works are a commentary on the transforming effects of the true gospel.

Seventeen centuries after Julian wrote of the power of good works, I saw this happen on the block in Philadelphia.

I was serving at a church in the Kensington section of the city, and we had set up a street clean-up outreach for our neighbors. Early in the day, a lady walked by, looking noticeably sad, troubled, and exhausted. My wife, Angel, approached her, asking, “Are you okay, ma’am?” She was clearly annoyed and answered (with a profanity added for emphasis), “No!” Angel still engaged her in conversation, seeking to care for her. She asked her if she needed food or water. Her response was telling:

“What do I gotta do to get it?”

I stepped in and told her, “Nothing—it’s free.”

I explained what we were doing. This angered her further, because she realized we were part of a church. She’d been deeply wounded by a church in the past and clearly wanted nothing to do with us. She suggested that we would make her join our church before she could get our help. I made it clear this wasn’t the case—that our offering was genuinely free.

She left that conversation with food and clothing. We thought we’d seen the last of her, but after about half an hour she appeared again. Her posture was different this time. She had come back to thank us.

She told us that a few hours before she had walked past us that morning, her father (who lived with her) had stolen all her money and food stamps. She was 22 years old, and she had four hungry kids at home. When she had met us earlier that day, she’d actually been on her way to sell her body for money to feed her kids. Now she would not do so.

We prayed with her and cried with her, offering a tangible expression of the gospel.

Our church helped this young woman and, by God’s providence, kept her from trouble that day. I don’t know if she ever obeyed the gospel and came to faith, but we did hear around the neighborhood that she’d been talking about us, saying, “They love people who don’t even go to their church and aren’t Christians.”

A lady in Philly and a Roman emperor saw the same thing. Good works make an impression.

How about your community? What do people living around you think about your church? What does your mayor, police chief, or city council think of your church? Redeem the rumors. Win a hearing for Christ by showing people in what you do what he is like.

Here are five practical steps to help prepare your neighborhood for gospel growth.

Cultivate prayerfulness.

This is where it starts. Pray corporately and individually for the lost people in your city, and for the Holy Spirit to open their ears to hear the Good News.

Cultivate the people of God.

It isn’t enough to encourage the people of your church to do good in the community. They have to understand why their good works are an essential part of evangelism. Without proper biblical preaching, teaching, and training, people will be wandering around with a misplaced sense of purpose.

Consider doing a sermon series, class, or seminar looking at the relationship between good works, loving our neighbor, and sharing the gospel. Make these points regular applications in your sermons, classes, or lessons. Make sure people understand that good works and the Good News are mandatory, both for individuals and for the church.

Cultivate a plan.

Research your city. Study the people and the culture. Find out what motivates them. Find out what troubles them. Communicate this to your church. Create opportunities for the people of your church to regularly engage with the lost and the least in your community. Don’t fall into the well-meaning trap of seeing evangelism as an isolated singular event. Mix it in with good works, year-round, around the clock. Talk with community leaders, neighbors, and police officers who can give you a sense of the social and spiritual climate of your community. And then talk together as a church, or as a leadership, and plan on how to engage.

As you do this, consider collaborating with others. You want to feed the homeless? Partner with your local homeless shelter. Find ways to come alongside the work they’re already doing, and seek to be a gospel presence while meeting a tangible need. Want to serve underprivileged kids in your neighborhood? Connect with a local school and get a list of supplies they need. When you value the work of others, you’re making connections and building trust.

Get going—and be patient.

After praying, learning, observing, brainstorming, and planning—get to work. Put the diaper drive and the delivery for the pregnancy center on the calendar and in the announcements, and make it happen. Recruit the teachers and mentors needed for the free financial class or resumé-building seminar you will host for the community. Do lawn care for older neighbors near your church’s building, open a clothes closet for foster and adoption families, minister in prisons. Whatever it is, get going.

And then be patient.

People will be excited about these ventures. But people will also need to have their expectations adjusted. There is a reason our Lord used agricultural analogies for the spread of the gospel. Planting, tending, watering, growing fruit, and harvesting take lots of time. Amid the initial excitement, prepare people (including yourself) for the plodding nature of kingdom work.

Leaders, all of this begins with you. Initiative and endurance are the qualities needed here. Be the first to sign up, first to show up, and last to leave. While you cannot neglect the ministry of word and prayer, you can also be like the apostle Paul, who did not need to be told to remember the poor by the apostles in Jerusalem, for it was “the very thing [he] was eager to do” (Gal. 2:10).

There was zero doctrinal or internal conflict for Paul between the ministry of the word and the ministries of mercy. Your eagerness for good works should flow from a primary point: your discipleship with Jesus.

We have the power and promise of Christ, so why wouldn’t we do all we can to ensure the people around us see it clearly too? It’s time to let our light shine. Your community needs to see a church shining bright and offering real help to those in need—practical and temporal help, spiritual and eternal help. Truly evangelistic churches are zealous to do good works out

of love for people and to win a hearing for the gospel that saves people.

J. A. Medders is director of theology and content for Send Network and a preacher, podcaster, and author.

Doug Logan Jr. is the president and dean of Grimké School of Urban Ministry and pastor of church planting at Remnant Church in Richmond, Virginia.

This article is an excerpt from The Soul-Winning Church: Six Keys to Fostering a Genuine Evangelistic Culture by Doug Logan Jr. and J. A. Medders. Learn more at thegoodbook.com/soul-winning.

- More from Doug Logan Jr.

News

Wire Story

Evangelical Broadcasters Sue Over IRS Ban on Political Endorsements

Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

Now that some nonprofit newspapers have begun to back candidates, a new lawsuit asks why Christian charities can’t take sides.

National Religious Broadcasters convention in Nashville

Bob Smietana / RNS

A group of evangelical broadcasters who hosted Donald Trump at their national conference earlier this year are suing the Internal Revenue Service over the so-called Johnson Amendment, a tax law that bars nonprofits from supporting political candidates.

Lawyers for the National Religious Broadcasters, along with two Baptist churches and a conservative group called Intercessors for America, argue in their suit that the ban on engaging in politics restricts their freedom of speech and freedom of religion. They further argue that the IRS ignores the politicking of some charities, while threatening to punish others.

In particular, lawyers for the groups claim that newspapers and other news outlets that have become nonprofits in recent years, such as the Philadelphia Inquirer, endorse candidates. Why can’t churches or other Christian groups, they want to know, do the same?

“Plaintiffs believe that nonprofit newspapers have a clear constitutional right to make such endorsements or statements,” read the complaint filed Wednesday in the United States District Court of the Eastern District of Texas, Tyler Division. “Plaintiffs simply contend that they should also have the same freedom of speech.”

The lawsuit is the latest challenge to the Johnson Amendment, a 1954 law that has long been the bane of conservative groups and, in particular, preachers seeking to become more involved in politics. The ban on taking sides in campaigns—including endorsements or campaign contributions—applies to nonprofits that fall under section 501(c)(3) of the IRS code.

For years Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group, organized “pulpit freedom” Sundays designed to have preachers violate IRS rules by endorsing candidates from the pulpit. As president, Donald Trump signed an executive order designed to give more leeway under IRS rules.

The current lawsuit pitches its argument toward similar religious freedom principles. “For too long, churches have been instructed to remain silent on pressing matters of conscience and conviction during election season or risk their 501(c)(3) status,” said NRB President Troy A. Miller in a statement announcing the lawsuit.

But the growing number of nonprofit newsrooms has added a new twist to the arguments over the Johnson Amendment that has to do with fairness. Those newsrooms, the complaint argues, should be required to abide by the same rules as other charities.

“Hundreds of newspapers are organized under § 501(c)(3), and yet many openly endorse political candidates,” lawyers for NRB and its co-plaintiff argued in their complaint. “Others make statements about political candidates that constitute forbidden statements under the IRS’ interpretation of the statutory prohibition against supporting or opposing candidates.

The Institute for Nonprofit News, with about 450 member organizations, including RNS, does not accept members that endorse candidates.

“Nonprofit news organizations do not endorse candidates and, under IRS guidelines, should not favor any candidate for public office in coverage or other action,” the INN’s guidelines for members state.

Karen Rundlet, the CEO and executive director of the INN, told RNS in an email that grants made to nonprofits often bar those funds from being used for political activity.

The complaint points specifically to the Inquirer’s candidate endorsements, as well as articles critical of candidates in other nonprofit publications from 2012 to the present, claiming all violated IRS rules with impunity.

While nonprofit newspapers such as the Salt Lake Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times no longer make political endorsements, the Inquirer does, in part because it has a different ownership structure.

“The Philadelphia Inquirer is owned by the nonprofit Lenfest Institute for Journalism, but the newspaper remains a for-profit public-benefit corporation,” Jim Friedlich, CEO of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, told RNS in an email. “As a for-profit entity, The Philadelphia Inquirer is permitted to publish political endorsements, as it has for decades. It does so following thoughtful research on candidate policy positions, qualifications, integrity, and track record.”

In their complaint, lawyers for the NRB and its fellow plaintiffs said that, despite the Inquirer’s structure, dollars from a nonprofit are funding political endorsements.

A spokesman for the IRS declined to comment, citing the pending litigation. The NRB did not respond to a series of questions from RNS about the lawsuit.

Darryll K. Jones, a professor of law at Florida A&M University who blogs about nonprofit law, agrees that the IRS is allowing the Lenfest Institute to “have its cake and eat it too,” he said by email.

“Other exempt charities can farm out their political speech to subsidiary organizations without diminishing their tax-exempt efforts,” he said. “Churches cannot do so because farming out political activity necessarily diminishes or even precludes the accomplishment of the church’s tax-exempt and (oh, by the way) constitutionally protected effort.”

If the IRS refused to bite on ADF’s pulpit actions, said Jones, it is because the IRS likely knows the Johnson Amendment would not hold up on constitutional grounds. On their part, many nonprofits appreciate the rule, Jones said, because the restriction keeps them out of politics.

“They can say, look, we’re not going to be involved in that. We’re not going to be involved in politics. We are out here to do our charitable deeds, and we don’t want to be on one side or the other,” Jones said.

Jones believes courts are likely to dismiss most of the NRB’s claims, especially its due process and equal protection assertions, which he said obscure the main point of their lawsuit.

But, he said, “Once you get through all the unnecessary weeds, the complaint makes a legally irresistible argument, the logic of which can’t possibly be avoided.”

He added that politicking by nonprofits would likely have negative outcomes. “Everybody’s going to do it, and then there’ll be sort of a race to the bottom,” he said.

A 2019 survey from Pew Research found that Americans would prefer to keep religion and politics separate. Nearly two-thirds (63%) want houses of worship to stay out of politics, while three-quarters (76%) say churches and other congregations should not endorse candidates.

The NRB hosted Donald Trump at its annual convention in Nashville this past February, where the former president promised to return Christians to power if elected for a second term. Before Trump spoke, Miller told those in the audience that the group was hosting a presidential forum and that the speakers did not represent the official views of the NRB.

The former president appealed to religious broadcasters to join his side.

“If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before,” Trump told a gathering of National Religious Broadcasters at Nashville’s Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center.

- More from Bob Smietana

Ideas

How to Find Common Ground When You Disagree About the Common Good

John Inazu

Interfaith engagement that doesn’t devolve into a soupy multiculturalism is difficult—and necessary in our diverse democracy.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

How do Christians live faithfully and as good neighbors in a world we don’t control?

In 2020, Tim Keller and I coedited a book titled Uncommon Ground. Our project convened a group of evangelical and evangelical-adjacent friends to reflect—as the subtitle said—on how Christians can live faithfully in a world of difference. Since then, however, I’ve rephrased the question for my own work. We should be faithful, yes, but also neighborly. And our world is not just host to real difference of belief; it’s also a world we don’t control.

I owe this subtle but important reframing to my friendship and work with Eboo Patel, the founder and president of Interfaith America. The most important interfaith organization in the country, Interfaith America does not advance a soupy multiculturalism that pretends that all roads lead to heaven or that our differences don’t matter. It takes religious particularity seriously, identifies conflicts and tensions created by that particularity, and works to find common ground across religious differences.

I met Eboo nearly a decade ago. On that first meeting, we talked about the challenges of having young kids, busy travel schedules, and public writing commitments, as well as the importance of interfaith cooperation. Since then, we’ve spoken, taught, written, and built together.

As a Muslim, Eboo does not believe in the saving work of Jesus Christ—and that difference between us is no small thing. We have other differences too: Eboo tells more stories than I do. I drink alcohol, and he doesn’t. His language is usually more colorful than mine. We are friends in spite of our differences.

What does this kind of friendship have to do with Christian engagement in the world? Almost everything.

My question of how Christians can live faithfully and as good neighbors in a world we don’t control is the interfaith question. It asks how we can be fellow citizens, coworkers, and friends with people who do not share our belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This question has become increasingly important in a cultural context where Christians are too often seen as self-interested and unconcerned for our neighbors of other faiths and no faith, in our politics and in our personal lives.

There’s nothing relativistic or wishy-washy about the interfaith question posed this way—nothing to suggest we should water down our beliefs or pretend they don’t matter. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas often says that few statements are more incoherent than “I believe that Jesus is Lord, but that is just my personal opinion.” The gospel is either true for the entire created order or a lie that has captured the hearts and minds of fools (1 Cor. 15:12-19).

The universal truth of the gospel compels me to want all to come to know it, Eboo included. But I’m also convinced that the gospel is best advanced through persuasion, not coercion or control. Eboo knows I want him to become a Christian. He also knows I believe his conversion doesn’t depend on me—and that our friendship doesn’t depend on his conversion.

Jesus is the author and perfecter of our faith, and the Spirt is the one who convicts the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment. As a Christian, my calling is not to force people into our faith but to live faithfully as their good neighbor. It is to bear witness to God’s story unfolding in creation.

That can include partnering graciously with those who do not see things as we do. In my work as a law and religion scholar, I have often advocated for greater liberty for others to live according to their own faith commitments, even though this increases their opportunities to advance beliefs and practices I find false and misguided.

For his part, Eboo wants to help Christians be better Christians. He doesn’t believe Jesus is Lord, but he does—just as Jesus promised—recognize Christians when we are behaving like Jesus’ disciples (John 13:34–35). He believes that when American Christians love God, love our neighbors, and demonstrate the fruit of the Spirit, all Americans benefit.

I have my own interests in this partnership. I want to destigmatize interfaith among evangelicals leery of the word by demonstrating that Christians can hold our convictions firmly and partner generously with non-Christians across many domains: friendship, advocacy, religious freedom, charitable services, education, and more. And I want to help show the interfaith community that evangelicals—especially younger ones—are eager for these partnerships.

One of my initiatives with Eboo, which this essay serves to announce, is called Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy. For the past two years, we’ve cultivated friendship and trust among a group of people whose voices collectively offer a counternarrative to the assumptions of the Christian and post-Christian right and an increasingly dechurched and unchurched left. We believe Christians can be friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens with those who don’t share our faith—and that we can do so within the fullness of our Christian identity.

This is the first of a series of essays at CT which will explore what that means between now and Election Day. Each essayist believes that the reality of an interfaith America provides an opportunity for Christians to engage our neighbors with confidence and compassion. It is an opportunity to “walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love” (Eph. 4:1–2, NASB).

As I wrote in Uncommon Ground, “Many of our differences matter a great deal, and to suggest otherwise is ultimately a form of relativism.” The Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy essay series will not minimize our differences. “But we can still choose to be gracious across those differences. When we demonize the other side, we miss important insights that can only be learned through charitably understanding a different perspective. We lose the possibility of finding common ground,” which in turn means losing chances to advance common interests and bridge relational distances.

My friendship with Eboo is one example of how we can find common ground with others despite real differences in our understanding of the common good. My hope is that in the years to come, this kind of friendship will become commonplace among my fellow Christians. And my prayer is that the essays that follow in this series will encourage and equip evangelicals in our diverse democracy as they ask what it means to be a good and faithful neighbor.

John Inazu is a law professor at Washington University. His most recent book is Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect (Zondervan, 2024). He serves on the board of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and is a senior fellow with the Trinity Forum and Interfaith America.

Learn more about Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy.

- More from John Inazu

News

Deep in the Heart of Megachurch Country, Dallas Mourns a Summer of Pastor Scandals

Emily Belz in Dallas

One leadership failing after another has affected more than 50,000 congregants in North Texas. Will the hurt they’ve experienced lead them out of the church?

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty / Facebook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It feels like an avalanche to Dallas churchgoers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- More from Emily Belz

Ideas

Triumphalism After Dobbs Was a Mistake

Marvin Olasky

Guest Columnist

The pro-life movement has forgotten its roots. We need to get back to basics.

Bloomberg / Getty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- More from Marvin Olasky

Church Life

Christian Formation for the ‘Toolbelt Generation’ 

Jen Hemphill

I always assumed my sons would go to college. When they chose the trades, it reframed my view of higher ed—and church community.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- More from Jen Hemphill

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A surprising omission

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Cultivate prayerfulness.

Cultivate the people of God.

Cultivate a plan.

Get going—and be patient.

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