Kwame Bediako Still Defines the Debate on African Culture and Christianity

Compiled by Bruce Barron

Seven leaders weigh in on the late Ghanaian scholar’s provocative legacy 20 years after his best-known book.

Kwame Bediako

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Courtesy of Gillian M. Bediako

Jesus and the Gospel in Africa: History and Experience (Theology in Africa)

Kwame Bediako (Author), Hans Visser (Introduction), Gillian M Bediako (Introduction)

Orbis Books

124 pages

$21.94

What Luther and Calvin are for evangelical Christians globally, Kwame Bediako is for many African evangelicals. From his dramatic conversion in 1970 to his death in 2008, Bediako was the primary architect of and inspiration for theological work that grappled with the realities of African culture.

On this 20th anniversary of the publication (by Orbis Books) of some of Bediako’s most influential essays in Jesus and the Gospel in Africa: History and Experience, his memory still reverberates across the continent, as indicated by the seven reflections collected below on his ongoing influence.

Born and raised in Ghana, Bediako was a professing atheist studying existentialist literature as a doctoral student in Bordeaux, France, when an awareness of Christ as the truth powerfully overwhelmed him while he was showering. He finished his degree in French literature but turned his powerful mind to the Bible and theology, later completing a second doctorate in Aberdeen, Scotland, under missiologist Andrew Walls, who called Bediako “the outstanding African theologian of his generation.”

Bediako attended the First International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974, meeting other prominent Majority World evangelicals including René Padilla, Samuel Escobar, and Vinay Samuel. At that time, he conceived the idea of a research center on the relation between the gospel and African culture. With support from his denomination, the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, that vision was realized as the Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission and Culture (ACI) in 1987.

While self-consciously evangelical, Bediako sought connections between the gospel and African traditional religion. He argued that the gospel’s success in Africa “shows clearly that the form of religion once held to be farthest removed from the Christian faith [i.e., African animism] had a closer relationship with it than any other.”

Bediako contended that Jesus Christ speaks to us in terms of our “human heritage.” In one of his essays, he argued eloquently from the New Testament, especially the Book of Hebrews, that Christ was our “elder brother” fulfilling the mediatorial function that African traditional religion ascribed to ancestors.

While rejecting claims of radical continuity between African religion and Christianity, Bediako also differed from the emphasis on radical discontinuity associated with Nigerian Byang Kato, first general secretary of the Association of Evangelicals in Africa. That tension between Bediako’s and Kato’s views on the interaction between the Christian faith and African culture persists today and appears in two of the reflections presented below.

Ebenezer Yaw Blasu, research fellow, Akrofi-Christaller Institute, Akropong, Ghana

I first met Kwame Bediako in 1988, when I was a Presbyterian student pastor. He was busy sorting books in what is now ACI’s Zimmerman Library. In our brief conversation, he exhorted me to ensure “Africanness” in my ministry. I listened, but without enthusiasm. At the time, my main theological inspirations were Karl Barth and John Macquarrie, who did not say anything about indigeneity in doing theology.

In 1990, I was invited to speak at an evangelistic outreach in Ottawa, Canada, on the role of Christianity in transforming indigenous cultures. Suddenly, Bediako’s earlier exhortation resonated in my mind. As if by divine intervention, I ran into him in Accra on my way to the airport. He excitedly handed me a new book he had published, Jesus in African Culture: A Ghanaian Perspective. Reading this book while in flight highly informed my message and contributed significantly to its success. For the first time, I spoke as an African evangelist outside Africa, to the glory of God.

Bediako believed that the theological education curriculum in Africa should equip Christian leaders for their task by connecting them with the redeeming, transforming activity of the living God in the African setting. If Africa is now a heartland of Christian faith, he insisted at a 1996 workshop, then “a positive affirmation of African Christianity, and not merely an African reaction against the West,” should be the driving force in curriculum development.

Kwame’s work has liberated my mind by establishing the undeniable truth that Christianity is not a “Western religion,” nor are Westerners the final arbiters of Christian theology and faith. Genuine theology needs contextual inputs, including those from indigenous or grassroots experiences. Hence, African Christianity needs to and can produce African theologies that contribute to the theological thinking of world Christianity.

Seblewengel Daniel, director, East African Sending Office, SIM, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Kwame Bediako was my PhD supervisor. His lectures were both intellectually stimulating and spiritually nourishing. He was equally committed to the deep rootedness of the Christian faith in the Scriptures and its authentic indigenous expression.

Bediako strongly advocated for a continuous engagement between gospel and culture. He asserted that people should engage their pre-Christian heritage with confidence in the power of the Spirit to guide and illuminate them. Conversion, he said, is not abandoning one’s heritage altogether and taking on a foreign identity but turning to Christ with the totality of one’s being. The divine encounter, therefore, will enable one to be an authentic African Christian.

Kwame was a charismatic preacher and teacher. The depth of his knowledge about and commitment to the church in Africa was beyond description.

Professor Bediako was very warm toward his students and had a delightful sense of humor. He took great interest in our lives and the lives of our family members. He made time to visit students in their homes, and he and his wife, Mary, invited us to their home for meals.

I value his unwavering dedication to empowering female theologians. He intentionally pursued affirmative action in his institute by appointing women to higher leadership positions.

Aiah Foday-Khabenje, former general secretary, Association of Evangelicals in Africa; country director, Children of the Nations, Freetown, Sierra Leone

Kwame Bediako’s groundbreaking work Theology and Identity framed theology in terms of self-identity as a foundation and hermeneutical tool for theological reflection. Jesus and the Gospel in Africa is a collection of articles on how Christ could be the answer to the questions Africans ask about issues relevant to their context, in contrast to the questions raised by missionary Christianity from the West. It demonstrates how God can speak to Africans in African idioms and through hearing in African mother tongues what God has done.

Bediako’s theological beliefs were inspired by his personal experience and how some church fathers practiced their faith in the context of the Greco-Roman culture. Bediako believed that it was possible for people to connect with Christ through their cultural beliefs, without the gospel having to reach Africa through Western missionaries.

One might assume that Bediako’s quest was simply about putting an African face on theology, providing Christian truth with contextually sensitive illustrations and applications. However, these aspirations for African theology were more complex and diverse than contextualization. They also involved an attempt to identify a correlation between Christianity and African culture, or between African traditional religions and the Christian worldview. This aspect of his project has raised doubts about the orthodoxy of his approach.

Diane Stinton, associate professor of world Christianity, Regent College, Vancouver, Canada

Under Bediako’s supervision of my PhD studies on contemporary African Christologies, I came to appreciate his enduring contributions to theological scholarship. He highlighted Africa’s role in Christian history, recovered the importance of primal religions to the flourishing of African Christianity, insisted on an integral identity for African Christian believers, integrated African Christianity into mainstream studies of Christian history and theology, and emphasized vernacular and informal expressions of theology.

After completing my PhD, I helped to launch a master’s degree program in African Christianity at Daystar University in Nairobi, inspired by its equivalent at ACI and graced by Bediako’s inaugural lecture in 2006.

A central conviction within Bediako’s scholarship and ministry was the tremendous significance of mother-tongue Scriptures in Africa. Against the denigration of African languages, cultures, and religions by many Western interpreters, Bediako followed his mentor Andrew Walls in seeing African Christianity as a living demonstration that the gospel is “infinitely translatable.”

Bediako exemplified what Kenneth Cragg called “integrity of conversion.” He exhibited an all-encompassing faith that gathers up “the broken fragments of our history”—a phrase from a Kenyan Anglican Communion prayer that he loved to quote—and places them before Jesus to be redeemed.

Kayle Pelletier, lecturer, South African Theological Seminary, Sandton, South Africa

As a seminary student sensing God’s call to theological education in Africa, I took a course on African traditional religion (ATR). There, I encountered Kwame Bediako for the first time. In the early 2000s, Bediako was one of the few African theologians whose work was readily accessible.

Now, after 20 years of doing theological education in Zimbabwe and South Africa, I find myself returning to Bediako to better understand why Africa remains such a syncretistic religious environment even though Christianity has been on the continent for more than a century.

Responding to derogatory Western estimations of ATR, Bediako rightly placed value on the primal religious conditions that enabled the gospel’s acceptance in Africa. Bediako sought to define an authentic African Christian identity through the African people’s pre-Christian religious experiences and beliefs. However, connecting similar, continuous elements of pre-Christian beliefs with Christian beliefs has only exchanged Western philosophical and cultural influence on Christianity for African influence, contributing to a syncretistic, tradition-accommodating gospel. Scripture, through which we must interpret any pre-religious culture imbued with general revelation, transforms belief and practice into its biblical image, creating an authentic Christian identity for all.

Nathan Chiroma, principal, Africa College of Theology, Kigali, Rwanda

As a young African theologian (originally from Nigeria), I attended two of Kwame Bediako’s seminars in Ghana. He encouraged me, as a young African theologian, to cultivate in-depth theological contemplation ingrained in my African background. Through his works and life, he gave me the confidence and inventiveness with which to approach theology.

One of Bediako’s significant contributions to African theology was the concept that African Christians can practice genuine Christianity within their own cultural expressions, dispelling the myth that Christianity is solely a Western or white man’s religion. He provided me with a model for doing theology in a way that is true to the gospel and the African context, challenged me to traverse the intricacies of religion and culture from a biblical perspective, and prompted me to reassess my preconceptions about African Christianity that had been taught from a Western perspective.

Bediako profoundly influenced many African theological institutions, originally established by foreign missionaries, that taught Western concepts out of step with our African context. His writings have been instrumental in transforming schools to better align with our local perspectives. In addition to redefining the bounds of African Christianity, his dedication to contextual theology has promoted a more inclusive and representative theological debate.

Casely Essamuah, secretary, Global Christian Forum, and Ghanaian native

Before his conversion, Kwame Bediako was an atheist who had arrived at his conclusions intellectually and with such conviction that he couldn’t keep them to himself. After his conversion, he believed that an intellectual life without reference to the living God and the living Christ was futile.

Bediako pursued scholarship in a community that had prayer and worship at its center. He saw scholarship as an opportunity for service and enlarged vision, not merely to please the academy but to equip local church leaders—hence, his insistence that ACI should be located in Akropong, the heart of Presbyterianism in Ghana, and not Accra, the political and educational capital of Ghana. Furthermore, the institute also requires that all master’s and doctoral theses must have abstracts in local languages. It is no wonder that the center he initiated continues to thrive and flourish in his absence.

- More from Compiled by Bruce Barron

Books

Review

After Covering Global Disasters for Decades, Nicholas Kristof Is More Hopeful Than Ever

Gary Haugen

The New York Times reporter’s memoir can refine our perspective on pursuing justice in a fallen world.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

I’ve got my top summer reading recommendation ready for you. In fact, I’m recommending you buy two copies of the book, Nicholas Kristof’s Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life. There are two reasons why.

Chasing Hope: A Reporter's Life

Nicholas D. Kristof (Author)

480 pages

$20.49

I’ll get to the second eventually. But the first is more straightforward: This is a memoir from someone who has led one of the most dramatically interesting lives of the last half-century, as an acclaimed foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times.

If you make a list of the world’s most shattering and consequential conflicts, catastrophes, and convulsions over the last 40 years, the odds are very high that Kristof was present to witness them. So too are the odds that someone was threatening to shoot him: warlords smuggling conflict diamonds in the Congo, Sudanese soldiers roaming the deserts amid the Darfur genocide, Egyptian security gangs wielding straight razors in Tahrir Square, Israeli soldiers patrolling the dark streets of Beirut, ragged teenagers marauding with AK-47s in West Africa, or nervous American soldiers trying to contain an Iraqi mob robbing a bank in Basra.

There is an even longer list of terrifying events where the weapons were being directed at people standing next to Kristof. Such scenes involve Tiananmen Square protestors being massacred by the Chinese army, heroin traffickers in Afghanistan, security forces in collapsing Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, or rioting mobs parading heads on pikes in Indonesia.

The book’s narrative would be implausible as a movie script, but it’s irresistible as personal storytelling because there is no hint of bravado, attention seeking, or adrenaline addiction. We simply find ourselves following a very sincere human who, over a lifetime, keeps taking small steps to go see what is happening to other humans who are suffering unspeakable brutality in the hidden corners of our world.

As he goes, he finds himself sharing the unseen terror borne by millions of ordinary people when history’s great catastrophes unfold. And once among them, Kristof becomes the steward of their stories. When, for instance, a weeping rickshaw driver desperately pedals his cart through a hail of bullets in Tiananmen Square, trying to get the motionless body of a bloodied protester to safety, he gives Kristof his commission with a shout: “Tell the world! Tell the world!”

In this case, Kristof (and his journalist wife, Sheryl WuDunn) fulfilled that sacred commission well enough to earn a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage. But such accolades are complicated, as Kristof seems to know: “We were feted as heroes while our Chinese friends who had contributed so much to our reporting were jailed or in hiding or worse.”

Comparing notes on catastrophe

This is not only a book about an exceedingly interesting and thoughtful life. It also poses interesting questions. How ought humans to live with eyes wide open in a fallen world of so much suffering, violence, injustice, and death—yet so much courage, love, undeniable beauty, and pulsating life?

This is why I recommend buying two copies—and with a specific suggestion. Treat yourself to one, and share another with a family member or friend of an older or younger generation. Read it together and compare notes.

For baby boomers, Gen Xers, and millennials, the narrative will take you back through certain seismic and shattering moments of world history. This is helpful, because it’s strangely easy to lose sight of generational trials you’ve already weathered when you are constantly assaulted with the screaming ferocity of today’s apocalypse economy—the outrage industry that demands your obsessive attention to every terrible thing that is surely ending the world.

Chasing Hope helps us see the elevated, longer arc of human events. From this vantage point, you can see the harrowing climbs and treacherous passages through which you and the world have already passed. It doesn’t make current challenges go away, but you may find it puts them in a less catastrophizing, more steadying, even encouraging perspective.

The truth is, there is little that transpires in a given year—let alone in a given 24-hour news cycle—that has the significance, gravity, or peril of a hundred things that shook the world over the last half-century. For example, exactly 30 years ago, the Rwandan genocide unleashed an orgy of murder that saw 800,000 innocent men, women, and children brutally hacked to death within a few short weeks. Nothing happening now or within the last 10 years—nothing—comes close to the speed and scale with which the genocide inflicted terror, death, and tragedy.

At the time, I was a 31-year-old prosecutor at the US Department of Justice. The UN sent me to Rwanda to direct its genocide investigation immediately after the war. That experience changed my perspective on everything that has happened in the world since. It doesn’t lead me to minimize or disengage from the tragedies of today. In fact, I’ve spent most of the last 30 years with my colleagues at the International Justice Mission immersed in today’s heartbreaking struggles to overcome slavery, violence against women and children, and police abuse.

But when I consider the longer arc of the human story, I find I can do this work with an elevated perspective. Much like Kristof in Chasing Hope, I am actually more encouraged and optimistic than ever.

For Gen Z readers, Kristof’s memoir will give you an intimate and authentic primer on the great train of global events that profoundly shaped and traumatized the world you inherited. You could consult Google and get a quick, metallic-tasting AI blurb on each event as you hear it mentioned in disjointed conversations over the coming years. Or you could treat yourself to a deeply human and coherent chronicle of contemporary history through the compassionate, questioning, loving eyes of a farm kid from Oregon who tried to honor the spirit of the world’s most vulnerable people—including Kristof’s refugee father—by telling some of the hardest stories of his day.

I think you’ll find that Kristof’s larger story offers an orienting frame and inspiration for dealing with the rushing scroll of tragedy shorts and screaming trend lines that surround our brains and send the walls of panic closing in. Grant yourself a book-length summer sabbatical from the culture’s newsfeed neurosis and let Kristof’s history transport you to a higher frame of reference.

And then talk about it with your book-club buddy from another generation. What was it like to be alive through these catastrophic and chaotic global events? Who saw things more clearly and wisely at the time, and why? What should good people have done? What should good people do now?

Christ’s heart for the world

These are especially urgent questions for people of Christian faith, who profess to know what Jesus would teach about living in a fallen and violent yet beautiful and worthy world. A world that, according to this same Jesus, he is relentlessly at work redeeming through his grace and through those who follow him.

Although I don’t know if Kristof is a believer, he seems thoroughly Jesus-curious—or, as my kids would say of so many friends, “Christian adjacent.” Kristof writes with a rare appreciation for the earnest, unnamed Christians who are serving, healing, and loving in the most Christlike ways in the hardest places.

In Chasing Hope, many of his most exemplary heroes seem to be following Jesus. Some are famous, like Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter. But most you’ve likely never heard of: Dr. Catherine Hamlin in Ethiopia, Dr. Tom Catena in the Sudan, Sister Rachel Fassera in Uganda, Dr. Denis Mukwege in the Congo, or the good people of the First Presbyterian Church of Portland, who sponsored his refugee father in the 1940s and made Kristof’s story possible.

For years, Kristof has written a New York Times Christmas column with earnest questions for Christian leaders about Jesus, the Bible, and the behavior of Christian people. As he has come to appreciate IJM’s Christian community around the world and their work addressing slavery and violence among the vulnerable poor, he has asked me similar questions over the years—especially about evangelical Christians in America.

For decades, IJM has been inviting American Christians to recover the biblical teaching about God’s love for the world and Christ’s passion for justice. Indeed, over 27 years, a generation of American Christians has helped power an IJM movement that has brought freedom and healing to hundreds of thousands of people who were enslaved, imprisoned, beaten, raped, and robbed in the world’s poorest communities. It would be a shame for American Christians to lose Christ’s heart for the world and for the vulnerable, leaving their preoccupations more inward, tribal, resentful, political, and fearful.

The Christian faith teaches that every person in the world—of every nation, tribe, and tongue—is of infinite and equal worth. Jesus taught that if people are hurting and in need, the relevant question is not Are they my neighbor? but Will I show mercy and love? Will I treat them as I would want to be treated if I were enslaved, imprisoned, beaten, raped, or robbed?

This is what makes Kristof’s life story such a welcome provocation for Christians old and young. In his writing and reporting, he seems to act as if Christ’s teachings about the world and its people are true, even though he may not share Christian beliefs about his divinity and the kingdom of God. What, then, should we make of those who do profess these beliefs but don’t act as though they are true?

More provocatively, what if they brought their beliefs and actions into greater harmony, radiating authenticity, courage, humility, and joy? Over a generation, I (like Kristof) have witnessed that such lives of Christlike beauty are, indeed, possible. And around the world, I see a new generation of everyday saints quietly doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with their God.

As I write this, I am in South Asia, coming from a profound day with two young women of faith (one from Nebraska and one from Bangladesh) who are partnering with IJM colleagues and local authorities to bring healing to women and girls ravaged by sexual violence. Like Kristof, they are chasing hope—and finding it. And by their lives, they testify not only that the teachings of Jesus are true, but that he himself is true.

Gary Haugen is the founder and CEO of International Justice Mission. His books include Good News About Injustice: A Witness of Courage in a Hurting World.

- More from Gary Haugen

Church Life

How to Flourish as a Creative Minority

Seth Kaplan

An Orthodox Jew advises American evangelicals on how to keep—and pass on—the faith in an increasingly pagan culture.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Unsplash

Consider this a dispatch from my neighborhood to yours. Christianity Today doesn’t typically publish Orthodox Jewish writers, so you might consider me a distant cousin, writing in an effort to understand and encourage American evangelicals as they adjust to a dominant culture that is increasingly postmodern and even pagan. While Jews see this era as but another chapter in a long journey, many American evangelicals seem to have lost their ballast—and with it, the cohesion and vision necessary to flourish as a minority.

What can this distant cousin offer? Let me take you on a tour of my community. Anchored by the rules of Shabbat (Sabbath), we live one day a week (plus major holidays) as if we were, as one visiting pastor friend remarked, “from the 1950s,” before automobiles, television, and apps came to dominate daily life.

Streets fill with people walking—to a neighbor’s house, a park, a prayer service, a celebration—and we encounter many familiar faces and get caught up in conversations along the way. Weekly life is sustained day in and day out by a strong set of place-based institutions working in tandem—schools, synagogues, restaurants, charities, and interfamily networks—together creating a string of close-knit communities across the country.

How is this different from what CT readers most likely observe and experience in their daily rhythms? Socialized to believe that their culture was the majority, it seems Christians have invested much less than Orthodox Jews in four key elements of faithful living required to thrive as a minority: educating children separately from the broader society, marking space and time to bolster community cohesion, strengthening local institutions, and reducing the influence of secular media.

From my vantage, it appears that American Christians in general and evangelicals in particular are perplexed as to how to handle a world in which they are but a minority. Nationally, many Christians are trying to reshape the majority culture and political landscape as if their own future depended on it, creating a backlash against the faith that makes sustaining and enlarging it even harder.

What would truly help American Christians pass the promise of their faith to subsequent generations? Here are a few practical suggestions from my experience living embedded in an Orthodox Jewish community, where those four elements constantly shape daily life for me and my family.

First, educate children separately from the broader society and make that learning a lifelong part of the faith. Jews are famous for our focus on learning. We are, after all, the “People of the Book,” and learning Torah is the central element in our faith.

But there is another rarely stated reason religious education is so important to us: Historically, only Jews who emphasized learning in Jewish schools and absorbing Jewish ideas were able to transmit their identity to subsequent generations; everyone who did not do so assimilated. As such, religious Jews build schools everywhere we go and (speaking from personal experience) take on enormous hardship to ensure that our children only go to such institutions. Public schools are not an option. And while some homeschool, most Jews believe that communal educational settings inculcate values and knowledge that could not be replicated otherwise.

Second, mark space and time in ways that can sustain culture, values, rituals, and identity. Education is only the start if a minority identity and set of beliefs are to be transmitted generation to generation. We must deliberately develop for our community—and especially our youth—an independent culture, backed by its own history and narrative and instilling a sense of quiet strength (and belief in the ultimate vindication of our beliefs).

Engagement and even partial integration with mainstream society is permissible, but it should be done in ways that do not undermine our community’s values and cohesion. Practically speaking, it is okay to live in a city, go to a secular college, and work in a big company, as long as you live and mainly socialize with your own community. It is essential to observe Sabbath and major holidays.

This observance is a “setting aside” that involves both space and time. Sabbath and major holidays do more to bond and interweave the community than any other practice. They force our community to live within walking distance of each other (no driving is allowed on these days), to temporarily isolate ourselves from the surrounding society (use of phones, televisions, and other devices is also banned at these times), to pray and eat together (families with families), and to celebrate our unique history and culture (through Torah readings, speeches, and classes). These days are a vital element in Jewish continuity. As a famous Jewish maxim says: “More than the Jew has kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jew.”

Third, establish a dense network of local institutions to support individual communities as well as the broader diaspora (or for you, the global church). Jewish communities establish a wide network of institutions wherever we go—synagogues, schools, mikvot (ritual baths), cemeteries, gemachim (free-loan funds), professional support networks, and so on. The unique Jewish mix of individualism and communalism encourages this development, but surely thousands of years of minority life must have nurtured the habit.

When you live in small communities that must survive without the help of (and sometimes in opposition to) the government, you must quickly develop new mechanisms to support yourself. These various social institutions—some formally established, many operating ad hoc or on the margins in smaller communities—play crucial roles not only in helping people but also in bonding them together in a way that builds social cohesion, identity, and resilience.

Fourth, reduce the impact of mainstream media. Jews establish our own media outlets and carefully regulate what information is consumed, especially by children. For Christians, this is where publications such as CT and its partners are so essential.

Media aimed at children are especially important. While my kids are active borrowers of books from the local library, and I encourage them to read a wide variety of carefully selected classical literature and history, we also subscribe to compelling Jewish magazine and book subscriptions. Some Orthodox Jews (myself included) have found it is better to use radios rather than televisions and to carry older-style cell phones instead of smartphones. Kids in my community typically get their own phones at a later age than elsewhere in America, and our schools do not allow phones anywhere near a classroom. (On the Sabbath and major holidays, there is no access for anyone, of course.)

A Christian reader may counter that Jewish rules seem legalistic. Yes, Jewish rules are indeed commands. This is a key difference in our faiths, and Christians seem to enjoy a liberty that Jews do not. I wonder, though, if community-held “constraints” would bring Christians greater freedom. Could they leave you unhindered by the burden of trying to change the majority culture and free instead to pursue joy as a flourishing minority?

This framework is not incompatible with the Christian emphasis on evangelism. If Christians built place-based church community around the four practical elements above, Christianity might return to the fervency of its formative years—before Constantine—when the faith was all about building close-knit, countercultural communities distant from power in ways that offered the world a bold new vision.

Strengths latent in Christianity could again become apparent if Christians offer a great counter to our mainstream culture, which has done so much to atomize and isolate us from one another. For example, Sabbath-keeping has always been a central tenet of both our faiths. I have met many younger Christians with an interest in recovering Sabbath rhythms and the community they engender.

But, as rabbi Jonathan Sacks warns, becoming “a creative minority” is “not easy, because it involves maintaining strong links with the outside world while staying true to your faith, seeking not merely to keep the sacred flame burning but also to transform the larger society of which you are a part. This is, as Jews can testify, a demanding and risk-laden choice.”

Jeremiah saw the destruction of Solomon’s temple and his people taken captive to Babylon, but he shared a hopeful—and practical—vision. He instructed the Jews:

Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper. (29:5–7)

Twenty-six centuries ago, Jeremiah foresaw that it is possible to not only survive as a creative minority but to flourish in a way that contributes to and shapes the surrounding society. Long accustomed to living in exile, Jews have fully internalized this message. Amid a paganizing culture, what will American Christians choose to do?

Seth D. Kaplan, a lecturer at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, is author of the new book Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time.

- More from Seth Kaplan

Testimony

To Guard Against the Monsters in My Life, I Became a Monster Myself

Tanya Glessner

A lifestyle of violence and addiction nearly destroyed me, but it brought me to the foot of the cross.

Courtesy of Tanya Glessner

I grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, in a home filled with chaos. Home was an ever-changing address, with my parents’ fights the only constant. My dad enjoyed his plethora of drugs, and my mom enjoyed pushing his buttons and being the victim. They finally decided to call it quits when I was 11 years old, but not before I got some startling news: The man I had called my father wasn’t really my father.

My grandma revealed the truth to me in an angry, drunken stupor right before breaking the news of the divorce. It was absolutely crushing. I had grown up with two younger half-brothers from my mom and the man who I thought was my dad. But now I learned that I also had two younger half-sisters on my biological dad’s side. I couldn’t help taking this revelation as a message that I was unwanted and didn’t belong. This paved the way for a series of poor choices that led me to the foot of the cross.

My biological dad made minimal effort to see me before he died of cancer in 2008. After my parents’ divorce, I lived with my mom and two younger brothers. She continued to choose men who were prone to addiction and violence. When they turned those violent tendencies on me, I decided it was better to become a monster than to let myself be devoured by one.

I started beating girls up at school and being rewarded at home for my victories. I was eventually expelled, leaving me to complete my schooling that year in the mental health ward of a hospital. Once I returned home, I ran away repeatedly and would stay with friends until their parents turned me away. My mom, having had enough, sent me to live with my grandma in Fort Scott, where I started my freshman year of high school.

But I was kicked out soon enough after a confrontation with my teacher, and I finished the school year elsewhere. During my sophomore year, I moved back home, and my mother and I got along like rabid dogs. When my 16th birthday came along, I went to school, dropped out, went home, packed my bags, and moved in with a friend in Fort Scott. This lasted about two years before I started bouncing back and forth between there and Kansas City.

My mother’s mirror image

Over the next 20 years, I gave birth to two sons of my own and married a man that was the sum of every man I had ever known. He was wild, abusive, addicted to anything that made him feel good, and promiscuous. I became the mirror image of my mother, mastering the art of pushing my husband’s buttons and then playing the victim, always convincing myself I could change him. It took over a decade before I realized I could never win this war. Finally, I filed for a divorce and decided to leave him for good.

At first, I handled everything well. I went to work, raised my boys, and occasionally had a girls’ night out on weekends when the kids were with their dad. I kept myself busy to keep my focus off the unbearable emotional pain I had pushed far below.

Eventually, though, it made its way to the surface, and I began to unravel. Girls’ night turned into every weekend. Every weekend turned into a meth addiction, which caused me to lose my job. Now bills were piling up, and I had to find a way to make money without disrupting my addiction.

I made a phone call to a friend I grew up with in Kansas City, who helped arrange a source of meth I could sell. Everything moved quickly from there. Within a few months, I was making a few thousand dollars a day and spending it just as quickly. My house was a revolving door of addicts, boyfriends, guns, and drugs. I started using the needle and decided it was best to send my children to live with my grandmother.

After a boyfriend broke both of my wrists, I had a lawyer draw up papers leaving my children to my grandmother in case something worse happened. I knew I was either going to end up dead or in prison. My addiction took precedence over everything in my life. At this point, all I wanted to do was die, but that was all about to change.

Making amends

Three years into my addiction, I found myself at a complete stranger’s house, suicidally depressed, injecting a needle filled with a large amount of meth into my vein. As the needle fell to the floor and landed in the old carpet like a dart, I collapsed to my knees on the verge of losing consciousness and cried out to God to save me. I wasn’t prepared for how he would choose to respond.

As a child, I had attended various Catholic and Christian schools alongside public schools, and my grandmother was a strong Christian believer. Perhaps, having spent so much time with her, I knew in that desperate moment that salvation could only come from God.

A few weeks later, I stopped at a house to drop off some drugs. When I arrived, I saw a woman I had bad history with, so I confronted her and put her in the hospital. I was arrested a week later and found myself facing 21 years in prison, so when I was offered a plea agreement of 8 years, I gratefully accepted it.

After spending three months in county jail, I started attending the ministry group organized by a local church for inmates. Toward the end of one service, I approached one of the church members. We prayed together, and I accepted Jesus Christ as my savior.

I received a Bible and some reading materials, which I delved into eagerly. I read the Bible so frequently that the pages started to wear out, and I had to carefully tape them back together. I found solace in verses like Jeremiah 29:11, which speaks of God’s plans for his people, and 1 John 3:18, which speaks of expressing love with actions rather than mere words.

As I sat in county jail, my mind began to recover from the effect of all the drugs. I found myself overwhelmed with remorse for what I had done, and I wanted the opportunity to make amends with the woman I had hurt. I slid my back down the cold, white cinder-block wall and adjusted my orange jumpsuit. I pulled my knees into my chest, clung to my Bible, looked up with tears running down my face, and asked God to make the way.

The next morning, an officer pulled me into the hallway to inform me that my victim had just been arrested. Because of my good behavior, he said, the authorities didn’t feel it was fair to ship me to another county to be held until I was sent to prison. Instead, they would let me decide whether I wanted to be housed with this woman or relocated to another jail. My head spun in disbelief, because this is not something that happens normally! I knew right then that God had heard my prayer, and this was my opportunity to put up or shut up.

As my victim entered the jail pod, you could see the fear all over her face. She went straight into her cell and crawled up into her bunk. I gave her a few minutes and then made my way over to her door. I told her she was safe and invited her to eat with me. In the following weeks, I managed to reconcile with her. We both expressed our apologies and started setting aside time every day to explore the teachings of the Bible.

We exchanged Scripture passages that resonated with us and even marked, signed, and dated our favorite verses in each other’s Bibles. Occasionally, I still glance at those pages, and it never fails to bring tears to my eyes, witnessing to how God worked within the confines of that jail. I’ll always cherish the memories of how God started to mend my brokenness. It’s incredible how he turned the devil’s plan to destroy me into something positive, spreading waves of healing to everyone around me.

I spent the next seven years in prison, earning all my good time. The experience was overwhelming, but I used the time to grow closer to God, and I established a godly reputation among the prison staff and my fellow inmates. I became a leader of a women’s Christian ministry inside the prison, and I started prayer groups in the dorms. Women sought me out for guidance, friendship, and prayer. I also tutored women for their GEDs, filed their taxes, and cut their hair. God used me in countless ways and continued to grow me in the process.

God never wastes a hurt

I was released in 2020, and, soon afterward, I married my high school sweetheart, who works as a paramedic. Adjusting to his schedule took some getting used to, as did the experience of being a stepmother. During my husband’s absence for 48-hour periods, I readily assumed various responsibilities.

Each morning, I diligently woke up to prepare breakfast and lunch for the children before driving them to school. I assisted them with their homework, accompanied them to their sports activities, and provided care when they fell ill. It was important to me to create a healthy routine as a family.

During this period, I also started rebuilding other relationships in my life, including the one with my brother Canaan. We didn’t have many opportunities to talk while I was in prison, so it felt good to reconnect with him.

He was employed as a millwright and journeyed across the globe for work, which meant I didn’t have the chance to see him frequently. However, we made sure to stay connected through phone calls and occasional text messages to let each other know we cared.

Fortunately, he managed to join me for Christmas during my first year out of prison, and it was truly special to share that time with him. I recall making a conscious decision not to take any pictures that Christmas because I wanted to immerse myself in the present moment, rather than being preoccupied with my camera. Little did I know this decision would later bring about regret.

In May of 2021, my brother was found dead in a Colorado hotel room from a fentanyl overdose. He was away on a job when he died. We had been planning his 38th birthday party, but now we were planning his funeral.

After dealing with the initial impact of my grief, I decided I wanted to do whatever I could to help families that might be suffering in the same way. I began mentoring incarcerated men and women as well as recovering addicts in my community. I sponsored a fundraiser to bring awareness to issues of mental health, addiction, and the relationship between them.

I also wanted to help diminish the stigma attached to seeking mental health services. We seek medical help when our bodies fail, so why wouldn’t we seek other kinds of help when life seems overwhelming? As part of this calling, I recently accepted the position of president on the board of directors for the Salvation Army and Compassionate Ministries in Fort Scott.

God never wastes a hurt. He is using my past to brighten others’ futures. I pray that God will continue to use my words to give voice to those who need it. When he pulled me out of the darkness, he gave me one hand to cling to him, and one hand to pull someone else out.

Tanya Glessner is the author of The Light You Bring, a memoir, and Stand Up Eight, a collection of personal testimonies. She has also published several daily prayer journals and is currently at work on a daily devotional.

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Theology

How to Face the Headlines with Hope

Clarissa Moll

The Papua New Guinea mudslide is yet another reminder that our world is not as it should be. But take heart! Christ has overcome the world.

People dig through debris at the site of a landslide in Papua New Guinea.

Emmanuel Eralia / Getty

Family members sit atop boulders, weary from lifting rocks to search for bodies. Men with shovels bend under the weight of sorrow and effort as they work to leave literally no stone unturned. Disaster has struck again: A massive mudslide in Papua New Guinea on Friday morning buried an estimated 2,000 people alive, covering dozens of homes and an elementary school.

By now, it seems safe to assume that anyone not yet rescued from under as much as 26 feet of debris has died. I flip from story to story, looking for more information, but eventually I have to stop. I’m starting to feel claustrophobic myself, imagining a roar of mud and rock waking me from my early morning slumber.

I had an all too similar experience with the video of the bridge collapse in Baltimore earlier this year. As I watched, I remember realizing I was holding my breath. The night lights of Baltimore glittered in the background. It was almost cinematic—I might have mistaken the scene for the beginning of a 1980s rom-com, the city shot right before the credits roll—were it not for the dark silhouette of the ship hitting the bridge, reminding me of the truth: There were trucks and workers on that bridge as it fell. I couldn’t see their faces, but I was watching people die.

And it’s not just Baltimore and Papua New Guinea. Over the past year, as producer of CT’s news podcast, The Bulletin, I’ve been exposed to many tragedies from afar. I’ve read photographic essays about Ukrainians who retrieve dead Russian bodies from the battlefield, scrolling through to get the gist and trying not to linger on the graphic images. I’ve read accounts of school shootings and racially motivated crimes and had to pause for a deep breath. I’ve scanned reports of famous personalities who’ve died and felt the familiar twinge of distant sadness. And I myself am no stranger to death.

Yet for all that, sometimes when I encounter tragedies like these, a thought flits across my mind: It could have been worse. I stop myself short, embarrassed. Have I become indifferent and callous? Or have I simply seen too much?

I’m not alone in wondering. As early as the 1970s, researchers began to raise an alarm about how visual depictions of violence could be detrimental to viewers, especially children. After seeing violent footage of the 9/11 attacks or school shootings, for example, research subjects reported greater distress than those who had only heard or read about the same events.

These results were hardly a surprise. Participating, even vicariously, in the suffering of others can bring great pain, anxiety, and sometimes lasting trauma. If a death in one’s own family could destroy a small, known universe, how can the human mind comprehend loss on a far larger scale?

Separation by pixels only makes so much difference. We don’t need to be flesh-and-blood witnesses for suffering to make an indelible mark, and our digital media environment is designed to make us witnesses of tragedy daily. Doomscrolling past one troubling headline after another can lead to increased feelings of frustration, worry, and despair. Is it any wonder three in four Americans say they’re “overwhelmed by the number of crises facing the world right now”?

The constant stream of local and global suffering we see on our screens can leave us weary, numb, or disillusioned. We may let lapse the kind of presence and care to which God calls us. Desensitized, we learn to gloss over “smaller” tragedies, letting only mass casualties provoke our sorrow, instituting a hierarchy of grief and forgetting the gravity of every marker of sin and death in this broken world.

Both science and Scripture confirm that God never designed us to be Atlas, carrying the whole world’s suffering on our shoulders. Jesus came to bear that weight for us (1 Pet. 2:24). Yet God did create us to “carry each other’s burdens, and in this way … fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2). He formed mirror neurons in our brains so that even at the cellular level we could understand one another’s pain. He commanded us to comfort each other from the wellspring of comfort we ourselves have received (2 Cor. 1:4)—a task that, admittedly, can seem almost impossible amid a continual onslaught of bad news.

So how do we fulfill the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves when we’re not sure we can bear their stories of sorrow?

In my work at The Bulletin and beyond, I’ve benefited from advice from author and therapist Aundi Kolber, who encourages us to protect against an uncharitable numbness by caring first for ourselves. “When Jesus says, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’” Kolber told me in an interview, “we have to recognize the wisdom of ‘yourself’ is included there.”

Practically speaking, that means scrutinizing my media intake, creating time limits for engagement, and resisting the tendency toward consuming media in isolation. Kolber recommended reading or listening to the news as a “single-minded” activity, not as part of our regular multitasking routines. This lets us attend to our bodies’ responses of anxiety or discomfort while “witnessing from a place of dignity and integrity.”

For others, different boundaries may be more helpful, according to our personalities, our wounds, and the individual capacities with which God has equipped us. On a recent episode of The Bulletin, host and CT editor in chief Russell Moore noted that some Christians may need to step back from media consumption for a season to instead engage deeply with Scripture. For others, said cohost Mike Cosper, a conscious differentiation between public and personal life may be helpful.

Whatever practical changes we make to our media habits, though, it will still be difficult to bear witness to the suffering of the world, to sit with the statistics about the war in Gaza, stories of gun violence, or testimonies of racial injustice. Our tenderness to tragedy will prove more durable if it’s anchored in community lament.

In lament, “we sensitize and strengthen our hearts,” writes singer-songwriter Sandra McCracken. Whether in a Sunday morning worship ritual of the prayers of the people, a Wednesday night prayer service, or a special gathering for a specific tragedy, corporate lament offers us an outlet for the emotions that might otherwise overwhelm us.

Together, we name injustice and tragedy and place it within the greater narrative arc of God’s redemptive faithfulness. We are reminded that God cares about the headlines, that he reigns over all worldly leaders (Dan. 2:21), that not even the “smallest” tragedy escapes his notice (Matt. 10:29). It is here, says author Sheila Wise Rowe, in grieving and growing with others, that we discover “our pain and anger are transformed and mobilized from expressions of despair into signs of hope.”

In all this, one thing is sure: God calls us to respond to suffering. As I scan the headlines each week, preparing a new episode of The Bulletin, I try to scrape off the calluses that build up on my heart.

When my eyes catch on a story that details great hurt, I often pray, Come quickly, Lord Jesus (Rev. 22:20). When I read statistics about disasters, I pause to remember that each number represents a name, a person for whom Christ died. As I scan the unfamiliar faces in newspaper pictures, I call to mind those faces I do know—family and friends in need, folks I support in grief care groups. We’re all bound together in our longing for redemption in the midst of a broken world, and I ask God to “break my heart for the things that break the heart of God.”

Finally, I look for ways to act, whether through a donation to a faraway cause or direct care in my community. I may not be able to offer a cup of cold water to a Ukrainian widow, but I can send funds overseas and care for widows in my church. I may not be able to solve the conflict in the Middle East, but I can seek to be a peacemaker in my workplace and in my neighborhood. Even in the face of the very worst news, I am not powerless—and God is not powerless either.

“In this world you will have trouble,” Jesus told his disciples. “But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

Across the millennia, we offer a heartbroken amen. This world is not as it should be, as each day’s headlines make clear anew. But those headlines need not send us into despair or make us cower in protective indifference. Though sin, death, and the devil make the news, Christ has overcome them all.

Clarissa Moll is the producer of Christianity Today’s weekly news podcast, The Bulletin.

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Books

Excerpt

‘I Thought I’d Be Further Along by Now’

Steve Cuss

An excerpt on risk, worship, and spiritual growth from The Expectation Gap: The Tiny, Vast Space between Our Beliefs and Experience of God.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

We often think we should be further along in our life of faith than we actually are. This tendency is connected to how we read the Bible, how we compare ourselves to others, and then how we reinforce these dynamics in our faith communities.

The Expectation Gap: The Tiny, Vast Space between Our Beliefs and Experience of God

Steve Cuss (Author)

176 pages

$16.79

I want to point out upfront that it is quite possible that we should be further along. I am not suggesting that we get lazy and stop worrying about spiritual growth. I am proposing that our attempted solutions to this gap are the fundamental problem. The gap may be real, but our solutions are often fruitless.

Many of us spend too much spiritual energy—and, frankly, guilt—trying to be something God did not ask us to be. We then spread that expectation around our faith communities and perpetuate the cycle. If we can notice the attempted solutions, and therefore the stuck cycle we are in, and get off that treadmill, we can open our souls to an encounter with God that can cause growth.

Let’s start by looking at the way we relate to the Bible. We each bring many assumptions to our reading of Scripture. We project our assumptions onto the page and read those assumptions back from the page, thus reinforcing our stuck patterns. Assumptions are always easier to see in others than in ourselves, and when we’re confronted by our own assumptions, it can be arresting or even threatening at first. When we look at the dynamics between Jesus and the Pharisees, much of their hostility was because Jesus was rummaging around in their assumptions, threatening what they thought they knew about Scripture.

We could explore many assumptions related to our reading of Scripture, but I want to focus on those that relate to the spiritual progress we’ve made in our faith. Let’s begin with a well-known story from the New Testament—Jesus’s invitation to Peter to walk on water:

Immediately Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowd. After he had dismissed them, he went up on a mountainside by himself to pray. Later that night, he was there alone, and the boat was already a considerable distance from land, buffeted by the waves because the wind was against it.

Shortly before dawn Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake. When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified. “It’s a ghost,” they said, and cried out in fear. But Jesus immediately said to them: “Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.”

“Lord, if it’s you,” Peter replied, “tell me to come to you on the water.”

“Come,” he said.

Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!”

Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. “You of little faith,” he said, “why did you doubt?”

And when they climbed into the boat, the wind died down. Then those who were in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.” (Matt. 14:22–33)

One helpful aspect of systems theory—the science of healthy and unhealthy relationship patterns—is the way it teaches us to notice the whole rather than the individual. On our own, we are prone to look at one person in a story and relate to that one person, but systems theory’s gift is that it helps us gain a more holistic view.

An individualistic approach to this passage might ask, “How can I step out in faith this week? What is Jesus beckoning me to do?” A systems approach says, “Wait just a hot minute—11 of the 12 disciples stayed in the boat. They still benefited from witnessing something astonishing, and they all ended up worshiping Jesus.”

In this story, most of Jesus’ disciples—92 percent, to be precise—did not step out in faith at all. In fact, they sat in the boat and watched as their impetuous and bold friend stepped out. Is the only right interpretation of this story that Peter was the good disciple and all the others were bad? Maybe rather than trying to be like Peter this week, we should try to be like one of the other 11. This week, less Peter, more Thaddaeus. Perhaps we could start a campaign: #TeamThaddaeus.

We tend to assume we must always be like the main character of any Bible story. But the reality is we will grow in Christ sooner once we accept that we are very much like ourselves, and none of us can—or should—always be like the main character of any given Bible story.

If you are prone toward action like Peter was, then go for it. You may well be a personality type that is energized byrisk. You may also be prone to act first and think later.

But what if you are the kind of person who, when invited to do something new or risky, first creates a spreadsheet to assess all options, along with a cost-benefit analysis? By the time you’re done listing all the risk liabilities, a soaking-wet Peter and a laughing Jesus are back in the boat with you. Is that bad? Can you love spreadsheets and risk mitigation plans and still walk by faith? Or must we all be like Peter all the time? What is it about us humans that draws us toward carrying the pressure and guilt of thinking we really should be someone else?

This leads to a second vital point. If we look carefully at this text, it ends with all 12 of the disciples worshiping Jesus in astonishment. Maybe the text is more about being astonished at Jesus than it is about us taking a faith risk. Maybe the central point of this story is Jesus’ power, not Peter’s faith steps. Those of us in cultures that place a high value on performance and improvement are prone to see every story in the Bible as “something I need to work on,” but much of Scripture is actually designed to help us worship our astonishing God. In other words, maybe Peter isn’t the main character of this story; maybe it’s Jesus.

What if most of the stories in the Bible are designed to primarily evoke a worship encounter with God rather than a self-improvement task list? We would do well, particularly those of us in production-based cultures, to be suspicious of our relentless need to improve and grow. If we’re reading the text with our minds always thinking we have something to work on, we may be missing the heart of God. Maybe God is less concerned with our improvement and more concerned with our worship.

The text clearly shows we can stay in the boat, watch our friend almost drown, and still end up worshiping Jesus. Now there is a sermon waiting to be preached! “Friends, this week, I don’t recommend stepping out in faith. I recommend staying in the boat and watching your friend take steps. You’ll end up worshiping Jesus either way!”

Steve is the author of Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs and The Expectation Gap. He is the founder of www.capablelife.me and has served in a variety of pastoral roles for 26 years, the majority of those years as a lead pastor.

Taken from The Expectation Gap: The Tiny, Vast Space Between Our Beliefs and Experience of God by Steve Cuss. Copyright © 2024 by Steve Cuss. Used by permission of Zondervan. www.harpercollinschristian.com

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Books

Boy Meets Girl, Fans Meet Jesus?

Emma Fenske

As Christian romances make their way to theaters, their writers are seizing opportunities for evangelism.

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

This spring, Someone Like You, based on the Christian romance novel by author Karen Kingsbury and produced by the newly formed Karen Kingsbury Productions, was released in theaters across the US and Canada. The movie—a tale of grief, romance, and a secret frozen embryo sister—grossed about $5.9 million.

Kingsbury’s accomplishments as an author and movie producer are impressive and, in many ways, singular. Over 25 million copies of her books are in print. Someone Like You was a New York Times bestseller.

But Kingsbury isn’t alone in her success. Female writers—romance writers in particular—dominate the Christian fiction market, claiming eight spots on the top-ten author list in 2023.

Since the mid-20th century, opportunities for these women who write—first in Christian bookstores, then on television, and now in movie theaters—have been expanding in response to growing audience demand. Along the way, these evangelical women have gained a kind of religious authority, crossing over from sentimental fiction to biblical interpretation and theology. Hidden behind paperback covers and movie posters picturing prairie scenes and happy couples, these texts deliver serious evangelistic messages for Christian women to consume and share with others.

The roots of Christian romance can be traced to authors like Grace Livingston Hill and Eugenia Price. But the genre as we understand it today really began with Christy (1967), Catherine Marshall’s story of a young woman in the Great Smoky Mountains. As secular romance novels became more sexualized in the 1970s and ’80s, women began to look for faithful alternatives. With Janette Oke’s Love Comes Softly (1979)—Marty moves out West, marries a single father, finds community, and grows in faith—the genre was established. According to Reading Evangelicals, Love Comes Softly sold “an average of fifty-five thousand copies a year for twenty years.”

In the decades since, authors like Oke, Beverly Lewis, Francine Rivers, and Kingsbury have been writing love stories imbued with Christian themes. Though romance is at the heart of these novels, their plots also take on real-world suffering, including suicide (Love Comes Softly), abandonment (The Shunning by Lewis), abuse and assault (Redeeming Love by Rivers), and grief (Someone Like You). The spiritual support they offer is particularly relevant to readers who’ve experienced similar hardships. Characters pray and get saved, worship and read the Bible. Endings are happy—and redemptive.

From the outset of the genre, Christian romance has had missional intentions. Many novels today include back-of-the-book discussion guides with Bible passages and devotional prompts. Oke has stated, “I see my writing as an opportunity to share my faith. … If my books touch lives, answer individuals’ questions, or lift readers to a higher plane, then I will feel that they have accomplished what God has asked me to do.” Kingsbury has defended Christian stories not just as escapes but as an “unbelievable force” in our faith journeys.

But Christian romance hasn’t only had success in print—a good thing for the industry, given declines in Christian book sales. For decades now, these texts have been adapted for television. Christy was a CBS miniseries from 1994 to 1995. Titles like the Love Comes Softly series (beginning in 2003), Hidden Places (2006), The Shunning (2011), and The Bridge (2015) became made-for-TV movies on the Hallmark Channel, appealing to audiences looking for heartwarming programming. More recently, Hallmark has produced television spinoffs of When Calls the Heart (2014–2024) and When Hope Calls (2019–2021), offering expanding storylines created within Oke’s oeuvre.

Now, Kingsbury has taken the book-to-television strategy one step further. After releasing four made-for-TV movies with Hallmark, she opened her own production company in 2022. Karen Kingsbury Productions released The Baxters on Amazon Prime in March, the month before Someone Like You hit theaters.

Christian romance novels aren’t exclusively sold in Christian bookstores; the Hallmark Channel, though certainly family- and faith-friendly, isn’t an exclusively Christian network. But for Christian romance writers, the move to streaming services and movie theaters does represent the biggest opportunity yet for more mainstream attention—and for expanded ministry.

Rivers’s 2022 Redeeming Love, a retelling of the Book of Hosea, models the kind of attention Christian romances might achieve as they move to theaters. The movie adaptation earned only an 11 percent positive rating from critics. But it also achieved a 95 percent positive rating from viewers and opened fourth in the box office its opening weekend. (Someone Like You found critics and viewers in closer alignment—a 46 percent positive rating from the professionals and a 96 percent positive rating from audiences.)

For both Rivers and Kingsbury, these creative projects are meant to do more than impress critics or make money. They have evangelistic goals—not just providing clean entertainment for women who are already Christians but drawing in secular audiences. Indeed, both authors have highlighted the opportunity for fans to take their non-Christian friends to the movies. Kingsbury has even offered crowdfunded tickets through her “Share the Hope” campaign.

Here again, discussion questions and reading guides make evangelistic intentions explicit. Rivers put out two study guides just prior to the release of her film—A Path to Redeeming Love: A 40-Day Devotional and Redeeming Love: The Companion Study. The story of Redeeming Love, she says, is “meant to bring people to Christ, and … to offer a tool for us to share our faith with people who don’t know Jesus at all.”

For her part, Kingsbury offers both a six-part discussion series and a seven-part Bible study on the Someone Like You website. Connecting passages of Scripture with plot points in the film, the Bible study discusses difficult personal themes like the loss of Kingsbury’s brother and the health challenges of her son (he portrays Matt Bryan, one of the film’s male leads). Through the study, Kingsbury addresses an audience of readers who intimately know her work, offering a space for longtime fans to experience spiritual growth.

But her discussion questions are doing something different. Here, Kingsbury speaks to a non-Christian viewership, addressing their concerns about grief and betrayal, forgiveness and peacemaking. “What questions have you had about God?” she asks. “What is your source of truth?”

Someone Like You has left theaters but will remain available for group events through the Faith Content Network. This platform provides access to the movie and its digital resources until streaming becomes available later this fall. With five additional novels listed as “coming soon” on Kingsbury’s website and the announcement of a second film, it seems her mission across multiple mediums is only just beginning.

As Christian romance writers bring their stories to film and streaming platforms, so too are their opportunities for evangelism expanding. With trust in pastors declining and church attendance plummeting, authors like Kingsbury might occupy a unique and unprecedented position—trusted by longtime readers and drawing in new viewers, casting the Christian story as relevant and compelling, hoping that “boy meets girl” becomes “fans meet Jesus.”

Emma Fenske is a third-year PhD student in the History department at Baylor University. Her research centers on recovering the cultural, political, and theological identities of evangelical women through mass media and pop culture.

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Culture

Mad Max Does Genesis

Zachary Lee

Furiosa begins with a retelling of the biblical Fall. After its apocalypse comes something new.

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

One of the first lines of dialogue in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a question: “As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?”

Across its 148-minute running time, Furiosa offers various responses to that inquiry, presenting a post-apocalyptic set of scenarios bound in blood, gasoline, and bullets. Ultimately, the film settles on hope—however foolish it may seem—as the only way forward. The desolation of what’s old, it insists, can make a way for ‘all things new” (Rev. 21:5).

George Miller returns to direct this spinoff and prequel to his thunderous 2015 epic, Mad Max: Fury Road. That film took place over the course of three days and two nights; Furiosa occurs over almost two decades, told in five pulse-pounding chapters. Miller takes his time exploring the transformation of an innocent young girl into the liberation warrior we find in Fury Road.

We first meet an adolescent Furiosa (Alyla Browne) with her mother (Charlee Fraser) in their home, the Green Place of Many Mothers. The rest of the world is a barren wasteland, ravaged by the compounding effects of climate change and nonstop warfare. The Green Place, by contrast, is a literal Garden of Eden, rife with foliage, wildlife, and fresh water. In a playful riff on the Genesis story, Furiosa opens the film by picking a ripe peach from a tree.

All too soon, paradise is lost. Marauders kidnap Furiosa, seeking to bring knowledge of the Green Place to their leader, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), a cruel and histrionic warlord who dreams of plundering the abundance for himself. Unable to save her daughter, Furiosa’s mother gives her a peach pit to remember home by and urges her to find her way back. From the moment Furiosa is forced into Dementus’s muscled coterie, she schemes and fights to return to the garden.

This extended allusion to Genesis sets the stage for Furiosa’s surprising spiritual heft. In this incendiary, “post-Fall” world, to live is hell and to kill is gain; evil is real, and redemption is desperately sought. Apocalypse is now—but that might not be all bad.

The word apocalypse, especially in movies, often connotes wanton destruction, horror, and violence with no end in sight. But the word’s origins are more nuanced. The Greek word apocalypsis is frequently translated as “a revelation.” In biblical times, apocalyptic literature served “as an intensified form of prophecy.” Critic Alissa Wilkinson and scholar Robert Joustra expand on this idea in How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, Faith, and Politics at the End of the World. The apocalypse, they write, “renews as it destroys; with its destruction it brings an epiphany about the universe, the gods, or God.”

Apocalypses create realizations that can only come with razing. The disruption they cause is not change in and of itself; but it does provide the foundations for change to be built upon. Apocalyptic revelation—even revelation of injustice, misery, and sin—is always an invitation to build something new.

Held captive and forced to serve different warlords, Furiosa realizes that the tyrants she’s ruled by have no desire to do anything new with the apocalypse they’ve been given. The vile men waging war for the planet’s resources, including Dementus and Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), merely recapitulate the same cruelty and barbarism that led to the world’s destruction in the first place, hoarding scarce goods for themselves rather than imagining a more communitarian alternative. When Furiosa is captured by Dementus after one of her many escape attempts, he sneers at her: “Where were [you] going, so full of hope? There is no hope!”

At the film’s climax, Dementus and Joe wage a scorched-earth war, launching the full brunt of their forces at each other. Instead of shooting a typical action scene, Miller frames this battle as a montage; it’s not clear who’s winning, or even whose army belongs to whom. The carnage caused by two small-minded rulers is both brutal and meaningless.

As Furiosa ages (actress Anya Taylor-Joy steps in to play the older character), her weariness and despair deepen. And yet she also realizes that true tragedy would be resigning herself to fatalism. Resolving to move forward without “the old ways” of revenge and malice, she puts aside corrupt cravings for power and commits to different motivations. The world won’t be saved by repeating what’s been done before. And apocalypse alone isn’t sufficient; she’ll have to take action.

When Jesus began his earthly ministry, his gospel was so radical as to be considered destructive by the powers that were. His message of an upside-down kingdom (Matt. 20:16), his radical solidarity with those who were overlooked and oppressed by the empire (Mark 2:15), went against the dominant worldviews of his day. Even his closest disciples rebuked him; even they did not understand his teachings (Mark 8:30–33). It was easier for them to imagine Jesus’ deliverance working within the framework they already knew; they couldn’t envision how transformative and total Jesus’ vision for the world would be.

Whether Jesus was healing on days of his choosing (Luke 6:6–11) or dining with society’s outcasts (5:27–3), his seeming disregard for the law was not transgression for transgression’s sake. He came to be a greater fulfillment of those laws; his radical amplification of their commands—including extending the definition of who one’s “neighbor” is—was an invitation to a new way of living.

This invitation is the same to the believer today. The work of bringing God’s kingdom does not end simply when we get rid of evil, but rather when we build better things in its place. And (without spoiling too much) it’s exactly this kind of building that the last scene of Furiosa evokes.

In Furiosa’s final standoff with Dementus, he sardonically commends her for learning the lessons of brutality and resilience he’s taught. “I’ve been waiting for someone like me,” he says as Furiosa faces him. “We’re just two evil bastards in the wasteland. … We are the already dead.”

This comparison gives Furiosa pause; she realizes that she’s seeing what she could become. While her arc won’t be complete until Fury Road—she creates a utopia where the captives are free (Is. 61:1), the hungry are fed (Matt. 25:35), and the stranger is welcomed (Deut. 10:18)—by Furiosa’s end, we see the beginnings of her revelation.

Oftentimes, after a climactic action sequence (in particular, a standoff between Furiosa and some raiders that takes place on a truck under siege) Tom Holkenborg’s rattling score decrescendos to a whisper. We’re left with the ambient sounds of the desert, the scorching sun upon the sands, and scraps of blue sky peeking through the smog and smoke.

In these moments of quiet beholding, the words God spoke to the prophet Isaiah come to mind: “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland” (43:19). Possibility may persist in our own wastelands, if only we’d have eyes to see and ears to hear. Not all is dead here. We plant our peach pit, and wait for it to grow.

Zachary Lee serves as the Managing Editor at The Center for Public Justice. He writes about media, faith, technology, and the environment.

- More from Zachary Lee

Pastors Will Try to Spare South Africa’s Tense Elections from Violence

Interview by Wil LaVeist

Oscar Siwali is mobilizing conflict mediators as the country goes to the polls. He only wishes his organization could train more.

Election posters from various political parties displayed on poles in Pretoria, South Africa.

Themba Hadebe / AP / Edits by CT

Oscar Siwali remembers watching Nelson Mandela’s triumphant walk as he left prison after 27 years. In 1990, as the young pastor of a Baptist church, Siwali saw himself as an evangelical focused on winning souls and tending to his flock’s spiritual needs, not needing to prioritize political concerns. Nonetheless, he shared the pride of his people’s successful anti-apartheid activism that demanded “Free South Africa Now,” an outcry that inspired worldwide solidarity.

But just three years later, a far-right white nationalist assassinated Chris Hani, a leader of the South African Communist Party —an attack that threatened to derail South Africa’s transition from the oppressive white-minority rule to a democratic government that represented the entire country.

When Hani’s murder threatened to unleash a civil war that South Africans had labored so many decades to avoid, Siwali, like fellow Christian leader Archbishop Desmond Tutu, realized his faith compelled him to action. He began to preach peace in his sermons and to talk to those who had taken to the streets.

“I saw a different way of the work that I was called into, where I wasn’t just in service from the pulpit,” Siwali said. “That was truly my first revelation in seeing the importance of the clergy being out there, engaging with people … and [figuratively] taking that pulpit and placing it in the center of a community.”

In 2013, Siwali founded SADRA, a faith-based organization that trains people of all ages and backgrounds to be conflict mediators in their communities. It also has special programs for local church leaders, whom SADRA believes can be most effective in areas prone to violence and political tension because of the widespread respect they engender. SADRA is the only faith-based organization contracted with the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) to train election mediators and observers, and its current mission is ensuring that South Africa’s May 29 elections do not culminate in violence.

While the African National Congress (ANC) has held power since Mandela became president in 1994, with Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa seeking reelection, simmering discontent and power ambitions have birthed new political parties. Currently, as many as 300 parties are vying for the presidency, each vowing to fulfill the sweeping promises of liberation and equality espoused by the anti-apartheid movement.

Meanwhile, a new generation of younger leaders has emerged, impatient with and frustrated by the elders who have led a nation of high unemployment, high domestic violence, and low wealth redistribution. Further complicating the election is the inclusion of independent candidates for the first time. (Citizens do not vote directly for president; rather, the winning party selects the nation’s next leader.)

Church leaders are on high alert that their nation could violently implode, particularly if people do not believe the elections were fair and corruption-free. Last month, for instance, pastors met with political leaders to pray and to strategize how to avoid bloodshed in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa’s second-most populous state, which is predicted to have a highly contested vote.

“Almost all of the people I know working in mediation and peacekeeping are gearing up for the national elections,” Siwali said. “Respected people in communities need to be able to watch over and be the eyes of society to make sure the counting is done properly and also be a neutral voice if tensions take place.”

CT talked with Siwali about his goal of training 5,000 church-leader mediators to work the elections, why so many feel frustrated about the state of their country, and how those outside the country can help.

How do South Africans generally feel about the state of their country?

For some time, the focus in South Africa was on working toward democracy and resolving the clear conflict between black and white people. The conflicts have now become about the lack of quality government service delivery and people not seeing the democratic dispensation that they had been waiting for, the freedom that people had been singing about.

At SADRA, we often hold community dialogues, and you’ll hear people saying, “I had seen on television in some countries that when freedom comes after war, the poor now live in big homes. The blacks take over the homes of the whites. But in our country, white people still live in the same homes that they lived in, and the blacks still live in the tin shacks that we live in. So, did freedom actually come?”

Some people even say, “Who said we wanted democracy when what we actually wanted was freedom?” They trusted the political leaders, but the leaders were not communicating that they weren’t getting the “freedom” they wanted because we have not been to war. It’s usually in countries that have been to war where you will have people who were poor taking over companies and homes from the rich. That’s not what has happened in South Africa because we’ve taken a peaceful journey in attempting forgiveness of each other and in working toward building a nation.

What is at stake in this election?

We’ve never had a national election with so many controversies like this. Former president Jacob Zuma has broken off from the ANC and started the uMkhonto weSizwe Party. The ANC lost their effort in court to bar him from using this name, which is from a tagline long associated with the party.

Zuma has already done two terms as South Africa’s president and cannot legally become president a third time. He could potentially get a third term if his new political party wins, because he would be with a different party. Also, Zuma is facing a trial for corruption and was arrested previously, and they are trying to determine if that arrest would disqualify him from being president.

The potential for conflict is high no matter the results. Some candidates have threatened to drive the country into chaos if they don’t win. There have also been a lot of political assassinations that have taken place over the years. In this context, we are training church leaders to work as conflict mediators and election workers for peace, with the understanding that anything imaginable can happen.

How do Christians tend to vote?

South African Christians are not a homogenous group. For instance, you have Christians in the ANC, the South African Communist Party, and the Pan Africanist Congress.

We have European churches and American-planted churches, but indigenous churches are the largest. They are Pentecostal and charismatic, with sometimes a mixture of African traditions and Christianity. Because of their size—Zion Christian Church has 12 million members and Shembe Church has between 5 to 6 million—they tend to attract politicians seeking blessings and political support.

How many mediators have you trained?

In the past year, we’ve trained more than 1,300 church leaders, and in the last seven years, we’ve trained more than 3,000. Our dream is to train about 2,000 additional mediators, looking at specific provinces where the level of violence has been higher, such as KwaZulu Natal and the Eastern Cape. The former president and the ANC are from KwaZulu Natal so the state KwaZulu is divided, because you now essentially have two ANC parties there.

SADRA’s trained mediators have been hard at work in the election preparation process in all provinces. Mediators are helping to facilitate conversations between the IEC and community leaders. Specifically, in three communities, there would have been no election registration had SADRA mediators not intervened. In each community, mediators took a volatile situation with protesting residents and turned it around into a picturesque tapestry of people’s expression of their democratic right to register to vote.

What does mediation look like?

When officials from the IEC come into a community to prepare it for the election, local people can be hostile toward them, often frustrated because of a sense that the government isn’t providing services. SADRA trains mediators to work with the IEC to deescalate tensions.

For example, IEC workers often visit a community and encourage people to register to vote. But because people are frustrated that the government hasn’t provided them with services, they will block the commission from entering.

In these instances, the local mediators we have trained will meet with people on all opposing sides and work in the community to allow the IEC to enter peacefully. Allowing the electoral workers in could also be done with soldiers and police, but this method usually does not end well. It is not good to use the barrel of a gun to engage the democratic process.

Who supports SADRA’s work?

Individuals, agencies, and overseas embassies contribute funds to the conflict resolution work that we do across southern African nations. African governments tend to watch closely who gives money to civil society organizations because of the issue of the West intervening in African politics. As much as we ask for help, individual local donors are also wary of giving money, as they don’t want to be accused of interfering in politics.

How has doing peace work impacted your faith?

I initially worked at the Quaker Peace Centre, and it was during that time that I met some of the members of the Mennonite church. That sort of introduced me to a broader understanding of the theological aspects of peace-building because I was working in peace-building organizations, but not necessarily from a theological point of view.

For me, this work is about being reminded of the bigger task of the church in society. There are very big issues in society that the government must address, but cannot do so alone. The church also has this responsibility.

How can people outside of the country support peace efforts in South Africa?

We need people to come to South Africa and observe the elections. We also need international grantors who are able to make grants available to local organizations to form local observation teams. Even with everyone who is on the ground, including groups like the Carter Center, we are still short when it comes to election observation.

In the last election, we only had 12 percent (around 8,000) of the required 66,000 election observers at voting locations. I’m hoping we could have 50 percent of those slots filled this year. These are the people who observe the count and keep the overall peace of the election environment. It’s a lack of money and government commitment, as to why our nation does not have the number of people in place that we need.

Pray for peace before, during, and after the elections. We need a lot of prayer for the KwaZulu-Natal Province where a lot of violence has happened already, and more is expected as we get closer to election day.

What we desire as peace-builders is that there will be a free, fair election and outcome that can be accepted by the people of South Africa no matter who wins.

- More from Interview by Wil LaVeist

Theology

What I Would Change After 30 Years of Marriage

Russell Moore

I should have invited Ruth to our wedding—to acknowledge how much our ordinary moments point to the story of Christ.

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

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

On Monday of next week, my wife, Maria, and I celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary. As I think about those two kids standing at the altar, I would want to say “I do” all over again to everything. One of the very few exceptions would be one decision that had to do with the wedding, not with the marriage. After 30 years, I’ve changed my mind about the biblical text I wouldn’t let us read.

Somebody suggested that we read at the ceremony a passage from the Old Testament book of Ruth, one that we heard read or sung at almost every wedding at the time. In the King James Version (which was what people almost always used), the text reads, “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God” (1:16). It’s about the young widow Ruth from Moab, pledging to her dead husband’s mother, Naomi, that she would go with her to Naomi’s homeland of Israel.

I believed then, and still do, that all Scripture is inspired and “profitable” (2 Tim. 3:16, ESV throughout), but I didn’t think that particular Scripture was appropriate for a wedding.

“It’s not about marriage,” I said. “It’s about someone taking a trip with her mother-in-law.” I wanted something about the mystery of Christ in Ephesians 5 or about love from Song of Songs or about Jesus at the wedding at Cana. I could even have lived, I said, with 1 Corinthians 13. Of all of the things about the wedding ceremony, I only insisted on two—that we use the traditional vows and that we read some other text than that one. You could say that I was ruthless in my Ruthlessness.

If I can give some unwanted advice to my 22-year-old self, the groom, I would say to him, “You are right about the bride, and right to ask her to marry you. This will be the best earthly decision you will make in the course of your life, but you are wrong about Ruth. That text has everything to do with your next 30 years.”

Thirty years ago, I knew how to preach about the cosmic mystery of Christ and his church, a mystery reflected in marriage. I knew that I loved this woman, and I didn’t want to be with anybody else. And I knew enough to know that the old vows were better, that we needed the words our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had vowed. How could we describe our commitment better than “for better or for worse … till death us do part”?

I know some people who have had hard marriages. Some marriages I admire greatly have been, I know, a fierce struggle to keep together. Ours is not one of those. We’ve faced far more “better” than “worse,” and even when the worse has arrived, it was always better because of her. That’s mostly because I’m the quirky one and she’s the stable, unshakable one.

In the biblical account, Naomi, grieving the death of her sons, insists that both of her daughters-in-law stay behind in Moab, where they can start their lives over again. Ruth, though, was committing, before God, to walk into a future completely unknown to her. And so were we.

If you had asked those two kids back at the altar in Biloxi, Mississippi—one of us 22 years old, the other 20—what our life story would be, we couldn’t have predicted how much we would laugh together. I’m not sure we could have predicted how—30 years later—we would still want to be around each other all the time.

We wouldn’t have known what it would be like to hold each other after getting the phone call about a father’s death, or what it would be like to feel the other trembling in tears after a miscarriage. We wouldn’t have known what it would be like to trek out together to a Russian orphanage to adopt two little boys, nor what it would be like to see in a hospital room our other three boys who came to us the more typical way.

I wouldn’t have known that the only ultimatum I would ever hear from my wife was about whether we’d ever attend another Southern Baptist business meeting. I couldn’t have foreseen how much the words Donald Trump would shape the circumstances of our lives, or that that year would outlast the seven years of tribulation our Sunday School prophecy charts had promised.

What I really would not have predicted, though, is how—just like the story of Ruth—so much of our story would be made up not in those “big” moments but in the very small, ordinary ones: the fleeting encounter in the gleaning field, the midnight meeting in the threshing place, the birth of a baby.

Naomi said at the beginning that she should rename herself “bitter” (1:20), but the text shows us the turnaround of her now rejoicing with Ruth’s newborn on her lap. The women of the neighborhood said of this old widow, who once thought her story was over, “A son has been born to Naomi” (4:17). Many things that seemed to be coincidences—just the right thing happening at the right time—led up to that.

Last night, Maria and I walked with our youngest son down to the creek by our house, where our son climbed some trees as we walked the dog. The cicadas were buzzing and the fireflies were flashing all around. I stopped and wanted to freeze that moment in time. It was almost as if a future version of myself was time traveling back to whisper, This is the best. This is the sort of thing you will remember on your deathbed. Those are the moments that shape a life, that surprise us with joy.

I didn’t want Ruth at the wedding because I thought I knew how words worked. I was, after all, a preacher and a former political speechwriter, and an aspiring theologian. I wanted our wedding to be focused on the big story of Christ and his gospel—and an out-of-context Bible verse about some women who’d lost their husbands just wouldn’t do. My problem was that I couldn’t see that that little narrative is about the big story of Christ and his gospel. The conversation led to the trip, and the trip led to love, and the love led to a birth for a family from Bethlehem. The story ends with the mention of that baby, Obed, but not as a mere “happily ever after” resolution of the storyline.

The book ends with the words, “Obed fathered Jesse, and Jesse fathered David” (4:22). The setting is cast for what would happen from Bethlehem in the books to follow, 1 and 2 Samuel, of the shepherd-musician who would be promised that one of his sons would sit on his throne: “He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever” (2 Sam. 7:13).

Ruth didn’t know that her promise to one old woman would end up leading to Israel’s king—nor that Israel’s king would lead to the deliverance of that family line from existential threat, all the way through to another story, that of a worker and a virgin, a story that would end up, again, with a baby in Bethlehem, one in whom the entire cosmos holds together, one whose kingdom will never end.

Your little story, and mine, aren’t quite so messianic in their stakes. But, then again, maybe they are, in some way. The Bible says that everything working around us ends up for good, and then defines what that good is—that we would be “conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers” (Rom. 8:29). All of that comes about in each of our lives through lots of little decisions that ripple out in ways we can’t see. Every once in a while, though, we can look back and see some words—like I do—that were the right words to the right person—words that we can only explain by grace.

Jesus is Lord. All of the story of Scripture—all of the story of the universe, visible and invisible—is his story. He holds the keys of life and death. And sometimes he stops by a wedding (John 2:1–2). Sometimes, in a wedding or, better yet, in a marriage, one can get a glimpse of his glory (2:11).

Thirty years ago, we said to each other that we would love, comfort, honor, and keep each other, in sickness and in health, forsaking all others, as long as we both shall live. I would say those words again. But I might add some other words too—“Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you” (Ruth 1:17).

At either my funeral or Maria’s, people can read any number of Bible passages; I love them all. But, if you’re there, know there’s one of them that I am happy for you to read or to sing or just to remember, because I will mean it then as I do now: “Whither thou goest, I will go.”

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