Moral Failures by Christian Leaders Are a Huge Problem. Can New Standards Help?

ECFA is adding leadership integrity to its accountability criteria.

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The accreditation agency for over 2,700 evangelical nonprofits wants to raise its standards to address “one of the greatest financial risks” posed to churches and ministries today: moral failures by leadership.

For decades, the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA) has established guidelines around financial transparency, stewardship, and governance. This year, the organization announced plans to add a new requirement to address the integrity and character of a ministry’s leaders.

It’d be the biggest change to ECFA’s standards in 45 years.

First introduced in March 2024, the proposed standard states, “Every organization shall proactively care for its leader and support the integrity of its leader in conformity with ECFA’s Policy for Excellence in Supporting Leadership Integrity.”

ECFA members and experts in the Christian nonprofit agree with the idea of the new standard but aren’t sure exactly how to implement it.

In an interview with Christianity Today, ECFA president and CEO Michael Martin likened the standard to a guardrail. While no written policy or accountability measure could eliminate sinful behavior by leadership—each leader ultimately bears responsibility for their own integrity—organizations can be doing more to help keep them in check.

“There’s consensus around the idea … that the board has an opportunity and responsibility to come alongside a leader to help leaders be in a position where they can best thrive,” Martin said.

In 2021, ECFA surveyed more than 800 of its member ministry leaders and board chairs, and 94 percent said leadership failures are impacting donor trust. Respondents also said they needed more resources for supporting the integrity of ministry leaders and wanted ECFA’s help.

A three-page commentary on the new standard includes the following direction for member churches and ministries:

The board, or a board committee, should meet at least annually with the leader to discuss how the board “can provide appropriate support in proactively caring for the integrity and well-being of the leader as a whole person.”
The leader is responsible for “investing in their relationship with Jesus and guarding their heart (Prov. 4:23), striving to live above reproach in the biblical expectations for leaders (1 Tim. 3:1–7; Tit. 1:6–9), and submitting in a spirit of love and humility (1 Pet. 5:1–6) to the care and support offered to the leader by the ministry’s board.”
The board should also ask the leader about the leader’s commitment to upholding biblical integrity principles, as outlined in a written code of conduct. According to the commentary, leaders ought to demonstrate traits like humility, growth, and the fruit of the Spirit. The board is then responsible for documenting these conversations in its minutes.

ECFA accreditation can provide a level of assurance to donors and participants, but it does not exempt a ministry from high-profile moral failings. In 2021, ECFA terminated RZIM’s membership because the ministry’s resources “were improperly used in relation to sexual abuse and misconduct by the ministry’s late founder,” Ravi Zacharias.

In 2019, Harvest Bible Chapel lost its standing with ECFA in the wake of controversy over founding pastor James MacDonald, which culminated with his firing.

Last month, Pursuit Church in Denver, North Carolina, an ECFA member, fired a pastor for sexual misconduct. Pursuit Church remains an ECFA member.

Scott Rodin believes ECFA’s approach to leadership integrity represents the kind of “holistic thinking” that keeps ministry leaders and boards in healthy relationships.

Rodin is a senior consultant and chief strategy officer with The FOCUS Group, which helps faith-based organizations connect with their donors. He said leadership failures have a ripple effect through ministries, impacting employees, donors, and the larger community that ministries are trying to reach.

Though the emotional, spiritual, and physical well-being of a ministry leader might not seem directly connected to donor trust, Rodin believes the health of a leader is reflected in the health of the organization. He said the proposed standard represents the kind of thoughtful work that boards of directors should be doing in the first place.

“A leader’s relationship with God, with themselves, their neighbors—it has a massive impact on how they do their work,” he said. Leaders encounter opportunities for compromise every day, Rodin said. “Fuzzy ethical edges turn into cliffs really quickly.”

Since announcing the proposed standard in early March, ECFA has solicited feedback from members through a form on the ECFA website. Martin said most of the organizations that have responded have affirmed the need for such a standard and asked ECFA for guidance on what implementation should look like.

The integrity standard would be eighth on ECFA’s list of standards of responsible stewardship. The seven existing standards cover doctrinal integrity, governance, financial oversight, legal compliance, financial transparency, compensation and third-party transactions, and stewarding financial gifts. ECFA did not specify the kind of integrity questions a board should ask a ministry CEO.

Frank Sommerville appreciates the intent behind the standard, but he says it is unclear what compliance should look like. As a practicing lawyer and CPA, Sommerville’s clients, about 70 percent of whom are faith-based organizations and ministries, are contacting him for advice about implementation.

“I applaud the effort of ECFA to address the issue of leadership integrity. I have seen in my 30-plus years that the lack of integrity in the senior leader can harm or destroy an organization,” he said.

Still, he wonders how ministries will implement a standard that ECFA intentionally left vague and open to many interpretations.

In its commentary on the standard, ECFA says its members have “much latitude to care for and support the integrity of their senior leader … in a manner that is best suited for their context.” The commentary also clarifies that the board does not need to be a leader’s accountability group. But ministries might struggle with where to draw these lines.

Sommerville thinks ministries might have a hard time determining what type of integrity they need to monitor. Financial integrity? Sexual integrity? Daily Bible reading?

“Is it the job of the board to hold a leader accountable for non-work, non-job performance activities?” Sommerville says. “Is that the best use of the board’s time?”

As Pursuit Church illustrates, ministry leadership failure does not disqualify a ministry from ECFA accreditation.

Though cases of corruption and financial mismanagement grab headlines, Sommerville believes they represent a small percentage of ministries. In almost every case of failure, he says, board members believed it was their job to support the leader without question.

“You don’t need a board that serves the vision of the leader; you need a board that ensures the leader is implementing the vision of the organization.”

Sommerville hopes organizations will take the standard seriously and not treat it as a box to check without addressing root issues.

Most of ECFA’s members are parachurch ministries, though the group says churches make up the fastest-growing member segment, just over 10 percent. Members are able to comment on the proposed standard through the end of May. ECFA expects to officially roll out the new standard in the fall.

- More from Megan Fowler

Ideas

I’m a Political Prisoner in Congo. My Ministry Is Thriving.

Lazare Sebitereko Rukundwa

Even as I long for health and freedom, I see the good that God is doing.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

The end of April 2024 marked my 10th month in detention at Makala Central Prison in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Each day passes, leaving the impression that I will be free tomorrow. I know the day I hope for will finally come, because I have put my hope in the Master of times and circumstances. As he says in Matthew 25:31–46, he is also detained with me here. When he is done with detention, he will lead the way to my freedom. My hope is built on that rock.

I was arrested in a legally irregular process. During the time I was falsely accused of calling people in my Eastern DRC region to arms, I was on a video (which my lawyers have submitted) promoting the Nairobi Process’ call for a cease-fire. In fact, I was part of that process and I have long been dedicated to achieving peace and development.

After being shifted from prison to prison and finally to Makala, I joined an Assemblies of God chaplaincy and a team of ordained prisoners who minister here with the help of donations and resources that we are able to receive.

Early on, I asked the committee about starting a literacy class in the prison due to the huge number of people who don’t know how to read and write. The initiative caught the attention of authorities and many people with a humane spirit.

About 100 people, men and women, boys and girls, are now benefiting from the program, and over 50 have now learned to read, write, and calculate. One adult student said, “I never expected that I would learn how to read and write in prison. Thank you for this initiative.” Many of those that haven’t had the opportunity to go to school are from the Kinshasa region and grew up as kuluna (street children).

When someone in jail learns how to hold a pencil and reaches a stage of writing, reading, and calculating, I feel like making a song to the Lord, the master of times and circumstances.

One child detainee asked the teacher, “Why can’t we have the program run every day? Learning is good for us. It also helps me to remain busy.”

Another adult said, “Now I need a Bible that I can read for myself.”

There are Bibles that we have successfully distributed. They make an impact not only in Bible study groups but also on evangelism teams. I have witnessed teams moving from cell to cell with Bibles, reading and sharing verses.

Besides the literacy classes, in April, we also initiated a skills training class on making soap, detergent, and disinfectant for 54 students. The teacher is also a detainee. We are able to use these products to help improve our own sanitary conditions.

Other initiatives include a tree planting project, a climate change course, and a class on making paint and pigment.

A program on the theology of work, which I teach, has also extended outside of the prison. One of our detained students was released weeks ago and, surprisingly, secured a new job in the government. He called me to request the syllabus, saying, “I want to use it to mobilize the provincial parliament members to learn and apply it.”

Another person said, “What I like about this is that you don’t only teach about spiritual salvation; it also touches physical needs.”

I felt very much encouraged. There are so many things to talk about, as God never stops surprising us with his “jokes.” He makes us smile.

On the chaplains’ committee, we confront problems to solve daily, even if our own issues are not yet resolved. There are those who lack means for basic needs such as clothing, food, and medication. I have seen more than a dozen people who needed money to resolve their legal cases. Once they were able to provide the money, they were freed.

In particular, I remember how a family of five, detained for over ten months, was released and went home after we donated the necessary funds.

In another example, the director of music here at our church in Makala sat in my little room and explained his financial problem. When a solution was found, he cried with joy and said, “I have been singing to bless the church, and today I am blessed too!”

Being a prisoner does not make me less human. I continue to dream, to be creative, and to be a person who can turn circumstances into opportunities. I am made to positively impact my environment.

Grace has been mine; I have pleasant roommates, which is a blessing—we share everything, and that builds our faith, hope, and friendship.

Moreover, I pass time tending to my plant nursery in the room. I eat fruits and keep their seeds, which I put in plastic water bottles. This has also been a good way of procuring peace of mind.

As I tell my roommates and my theology of work class, nature is our relative. My conversation with the environment dates way back to the 1970s with my small shamba (farm) of potatoes. The area still carries my name, “mukwa Lazaro” (at Lazare’s).

When I was arrested, my medicine was left behind. Later on, my medicine was brought and shown to me, but it was never given to me to use. Without that medicine, I have still survived, even though I experience many health issues with no appropriate medical attention. Through all these circumstances, God has been my healer and protector.

It is easy to be stressed with unbearable living conditions. I can think like the apostle Paul, How come I minister to the needs of others, and yet my own case is unresolved and my needs unmet? But my answer is already written:

Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. (2 Cor. 12:8–9)

I feel that the work of this ministry is firm, and that it’s now time to go back home.

Lazare Sebitereko Rukundwa, an Assemblies of God member, founded Eben-Ezer University of Minembwe in South Kivu, DRC. He was a civil society delegate during the Inter-Congolese Peace Consultations in Nairobi. His family and the people of Minembwe await his release.

- More from Lazare Sebitereko Rukundwa

Theology

How to Be a Christian Influencer Worthy of the Name

Justin Giboney

We do not deserve to wield influence in the church while being simps and sycophants to the secular world.

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

There’s good reason for the church to be wary of social media influencers—particularly those who speak to spiritual matters. We aren’t wrong to be disconcerted at the idea of Christians being led by online personalities who might be more charismatic than theologically sound or more creative than credible, especially when the influencers are disconnected from church discipleship and discipline themselves. Algorithms, monetization, and viral moments create endless temptations and adverse incentives that can seduce even well-meaning creators into serving themselves and the worst elements of pop culture.

Yet I’m also persuaded it’s possible for Christians to speak faithfully in that tension, and that we do ourselves no favors by running away from the reality of social media’s influence.

I was reminded of this while attending this month’s Black Christian Influencers (BCI) Conference, where founder Jackie Horbrook succeeded in curating an atmosphere that was both aesthetically dope and substantively gospel-centered. Christian creators in fields as varied as theology, activism, and fashion came together to discuss how to use their platforms to glorify God—and how to navigate the risks that come with staying on the cutting edge of culture while centering Christ.

Those risks are not as new as they may seem. In John 7, Jesus’ brothers essentially tell him that he’s not maximizing his potential as a pre-digital influencer. He needed to be more outward-facing, they argued, and show off his miraculous works more frequently because “no one who wants to become a public figure acts in secret” (v. 4).

That advice exposed their failure to understand Jesus’ true mission. Even though he’d become a popular public figure, his purpose was much more significant than a few “viral moments.” Jesus wasn’t pursuing influence for its own sake; his message and timing had to align with the Father’s plan of salvation. “My teaching is not my own,” he told his amazed audience. “It comes from the one who sent me” (v. 16).

That text should guide Christians who have a social media ministry and influence the lives of thousands or millions of people. We must never be more concerned with growing our platforms than with stewarding our influence faithfully. God has not placed us in this position to flex and revel in the admiration. Christian influence comes with a cross. Its purpose is far more about self-sacrifice than self-indulgence.

Or it should be, anyway. The design of the medium will always make that model of faithfulness counterintuitive. Successful influencers are proficient at protecting their platform and knowing what their audience wants, which puts them in constant danger of audience capture. This happens when we pander to our audiences, giving them only what they expect to see and want to hear in clever ways—following their lead maybe even more than they follow ours.

A faithful ministry cannot do this. We must tell the truth to our audience instead of tickling their ears (2 Tim. 4:3).

This may well be bad for business. Piling on an opponent will always get more likes than in-group critique. The conservative crowd wants to hear about how diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs are ruining America, and the social justice crowd wants an endless review of white evangelism’s misdeeds. Neither wants to hear about how they themselves fall short of gospel compassion or truth.

But if our public witness is dictated by digital rewards, we’re far from Christlike. A chapter before his brothers’ confused advice, as his ministry was drawing large crowds, Jesus did what would be unthinkable to some influencers: He gave the crowd a hard teaching that caused many of his followers to desert him (John 6:53–66). The purpose of his ministry was never to pacify or flatter his audience by affirming all their self-perceptions and preconceived notions. He was there to edify them and bring them to the cross. Likewise, an influencer unwilling to lose followers for the sake of truth cannot engage faithfully.

Many influencers will also face a temptation to imitate and endorse popular culture. For those engaged in social justice and action, too often our theology can become flimsy and ambiguous. Messages about the Christian sexual ethic and the sanctity of life start to disappear from our platforms. We don’t want to lose secular political allies, offend the custodians of culture, or go viral for having “regressive” views. I myself remember hesitating to critique the Black Lives Matter organization’s alternative to the traditional family ethic. I supported the racial justice message in principle, but I knew many of my peers would construe any disagreement as disloyalty.

Too few of us have the boldness to engage secular activists and academics while upholding the authority of Scripture. We are too busy trying to fit in. Some of us are just happy to be invited to the table and to be associated with this person or that institution. But we do not deserve to wield influence in the church while being simps and sycophants to the secular world.

That description is neither hyperbolic nor hypothetical. I’ve seen Christian influencers scrub their platforms of content they’d produced with saints like Jackie Hill Perry after being called out for nothing other than the “offense” of sharing a screen with Perry while she spoke the gospel truth. They look more like Simon the Sorcerer than Jesus—using the church to further their careers at the expense of the gospel (Acts 8:9–25).

A Christian influencer, to be worthy of the name, must be a teacher with a cross. We must use our talents and recognition to lead people toward Christ, not ourselves.

This is a high standard, but it is a standard Christians can and do meet, as I saw firsthand at the BCI Conference. From comedian Matthew Hudson spreading the gospel through satire to Ekemini Uwan loving her neighbors through advocacy, Christian influencers are using social media in furtherance of the Great Commission. This is a new medium for the church—and for church accountability—but it is an opportunity to follow Jesus in pointing those amazed by our teaching to God.

Justin Giboney is an ordained minister, attorney, and the president of the AND Campaign, a Christian civic organization. He’s the coauthor of Compassion (&) Conviction: The AND Campaign’s Guide to Faithful Civic Engagement.

- More from Justin Giboney

Culture

Forrest Frank Is Making the Internet’s Vibiest Christian Music

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

His upbeat hits and worship collaborations are capturing younger listeners on social media.

Forrest Frank (right) and Connor Price (left) took off on social media as the popular musical duo Surfaces.

Edits by Christianity Today / Source Images: Screenshots of Youtube

Some of the most popular music we hear in our Instagram and TikTok feeds comes from Forrest Frank, the independent artist and music producer known for his viral, feel-good songs.

His beat-driven pop combines vibey grooves and infectious hooks in hits like “Up!” and “Good Day.”

Frank was the top-ranked new artist on last year’s Billboard Christian charts, and his advice for fellow Christian musicians is this: Make good music, and the audience will follow.

The 28-year-old has found a massive audience by leveraging his production abilities, social media savvy, and collaborative approach to music-making. But he’s confident his songs climb the charts on Spotify and trend on social platforms because they are good songs, not because he’s figured out how to hack the algorithms.

“If your content’s not doing well, the song’s not good enough,” the 28-year-old said on YTH Nation, a podcast by the youth ministry at Elevation Church.

The Waco, Texas-based musician and Baylor University grad is half of the popular duo Surfaces, and he has teamed up with an array of popular Christian artists including Elevation, Maverick City Music, Lecrae, and Hulvey.

A common theme of Forrest Frank’s social media content is debunking the perception that Christian music is boring or corny, or that young people won’t listen to music with faith-forward lyrics.

https://www.instagram.com/p/C5tVLlwvEEr/

His success seems to be proving that there is a large cohort of Gen-Z Christians looking for music that speaks openly and unapologetically about Jesus.

One of his viral reels shows Frank and Hulvey leading a passionate crowd of young adults in worship at a concert with the text Christian rap isn’t worship (sarcastically) overlaid, as the two artists and the audience sing the words of their song “Altar”: Glory to the Father / You deserve the praise / Lead me to your altar / Wash away my shame.

Frank is convinced that a rising cohort of Christian artists have the potential to capture audiences who aren’t even looking for Christian music.

“In the same way that Christians have sacrificed their value systems to absorb worldly art, I think what’s coming is the world’s going to sacrifice its value systems to absorb Christian art,” he said.

Frank seems to see himself appealing to listeners who are concerned about the content of secular music but haven’t found a Christian alternative good enough to pull them away. (That may seem like a dig at previous generations of Christian artists, but it’s a generational rite of passage for younger listeners to perceive the music of their parents as passé.)

Christian art—music included—has shaped human culture for millenia, but Frank is looking at the here and now. What is Gen Z (and older Gen Alpha) looking for? And how can Christian musicians offer something new, relatable, and redemptive?

Frank has 4.1 million followers across social media platforms. In March, his song “Always” briefly became the No. 1 trending song on Instagram. Last month’s EP release, “God Is Good,” featuring Christian hip-hop artist Caleb Gordon, already has 2.1 million streams on Spotify, and a reel featuring the song and duo has 1.2 million views.

“A Christian song is the 12th most viral song in America right now,” Frank said in a video posted on Instagram, before breaking into the chorus of “Good Day.”

Another post says, “A Christian song is the #1 most viral song in all Brazil,” cheering the popularity of “No Longer Bound,” a collab with Hulvey.

According to Chartmetric, 16.3 percent of Forrest Frank’s listenership is in Brazil; he occasionally translates and reposts content in Portuguese as a shout-out to his Brazilian fans.

“Content is an art form,” Frank told Elevation YTH. “I try to be kind to my viewers. It’s like running a restaurant. You’re gonna just be like, ‘Here’s your food.’ No, it’s like, ‘Here’s your perfect plate I made for you. I hope you love it.’”

Frank grew up in the church and surrounded by musicians—his mother was a worship leader and his grandmother wrote children’s music—but he didn’t aspire to become a Christian artist or even to pursue a career as a performer.

He began experimenting with making music as a high school student after seeing an artist on YouTube using a Maschine—a compact digital workstation used to generate melodic and percussive audio material using knobs and buttons—to make beats. He bought his own Maschine Mikro and was immediately hooked on the process of DIY music-making. At Baylor, he put in hours of work in isolation, developing his skills as a producer and composer.

Frank says that he started to fall away from his faith in college and points to a pivotal experience that reignited his faith: a spur-of-the-moment decision to show up at a worship night at a church.

“I remember just falling on my knees and crying out to Jesus,” Frank recalled, as he told the story to Elevation YTH.

After graduating, Frank took an office job and continued to make and release music as a hobby, waiting to see if his creative work would find an audience. It did; and after about a year of managing a job and an accelerating music career, he left to pursue music full-time.

Frank’s success as a Christian artist is preceded by the success of Surfaces; their song “Sunday Best” peaked at No. 19 on the Billboard Hot 100, and the duo collaborated with Elton John on the song “Learn to Fly” for the iconic singer’s album The Lockdown Sessions, produced in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C10JFGwx20v/

In 2018, Frank released his first solo album, Warm, under the name Forrest. It’s only over the last year and a half that Frank has broken out as a Christian artist as “Forrest Frank.”

Today’s listeners—across genres and niches—find so much of their music online, but not all artists have succeeded in using digital platforms and harnessing social media algorithms. Artists like Frank seem to be finding success because they understand what their audience wants from the music and, perhaps as importantly, what they want to do with it.

“Most artists I know really struggle with social media. It feels like self-promotion,” said Wisdom Moon, founder of Lula Music Group, a consulting and management agency for Christian artists.

“You have to look at it as serving your audience by giving them something hopeful, something they relate to.”

Songs go viral on TikTok and Instagram not because they are catchy (that’s part of it) but because they are useful as sound clips to act as background music for content by other creators and followers.

“Artists have to think of their careers not just as musicians but also as content creators,” said Moon, who has also worked for Christian music labels like Centricity and Integrity.

And for Christian artists, faith plays a part in the content they contribute and contribute to. The most successful ones think of themselves as cocreators with their audiences.

Songs like “Good Day” and “Up!” are bouncy and lighthearted, the perfect background track for a TikTok from a beach vacation or a reel showing an unmedicated labor with amazingly good vibes. They serve an audience that wants the music to feel like it could score their lives, or the lives they want to have.

This pragmatic, social media–conscious approach to music-making may seem at odds with the missional vision Christian artists like Frank articulate for their music. But Moon pointed out that popular Christian musicians have always had to navigate this tension between utility and witness.

https://www.instagram.com/p/C6XRdkePFDh/

Christian songs have long served as an inspirational soundtrack for young Christians as they build their identities. He recalled his days in youth ministry, making highlight videos from mission trips using Audio Adrenaline’s “Hands and Feet” as background music.

“Christian audiences are looking for songs that speak to their life and point to Jesus at the same time,” said Moon. “Christian music has always had to serve a dual purpose.”

People used to add their personal soundtracks to wedding slideshows and senior photo montages, but now every moment can be scored with background music on video platforms like TikTok and Instagram. It’s part of how audiences, including young Christians, engage with music these days.

The musician / content creator model opens doors for independent artists like Frank to build a career without the interference of a label (although, Frank had the benefit of being a successful label-represented musician prior to embarking on a career as an indie solo artist). It also prompts artists to allow their listeners access to their personal lives for the sake of building a community and following. Frank has embraced the model by posting photos of his wife, child, and home, and occasionally incorporating them in his musical content.

As a solo artist, Frank has released an impressive amount of music in a short time. His 2023 album New Hymns features a laid-back rendition of “Amazing Grace” and a guest appearance by rapper Lecrae on “Nothing but the Blood.” He also released a Christmas album last year, A Merry Lofi Christmas, which showcases Frank’s laid-back vocals but against a cozier soundscape than his viral, danceable songs like “Up!” and features jazz saxophone solos and brass.

In February, he released a remix of “Praises” with Elevation Rhythm. In April, he released the EP God Is Good. This spring, several of his singles (“Up!,” “God Is Good,” “Always,” and “Good Day”) have gone viral on social media.

Frank is committed to serving his growing audience, but he says he’s open to whatever God has next, whether that’s continuing on this trajectory or doing something else (he jokes that if he didn’t make it as a musician, he would have probably become a massage therapist or a chiropractor).

“If God told me to delete my Spotify, I’d do it right now. If God told me to delete my Instagram, I’d do it right now.”

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Theology

The Loosening of American Evangelicalism

Brad East

Long-standing norms against drinking, tattoos, and Catholic-coded church practices have rapidly fallen. What’s going on?

Icee Dc / Unsplash / Edits by CT

Something has happened in the last 25 years in American evangelicalism—what I believe to be a massive generational shift. I’d like to sketch a picture of the change I see and ask if you see it too.

First, though, let me set the scene. I have in mind low-church Protestant traditions in the United States: churches centered on the Bible, evangelism, and personal faith in Jesus; often but not necessarily nondenominational, with moderate to minimal emphasis on sacraments, liturgy, and ecclesiastical authority; and marked by a revivalist style as well as conservative beliefs about sex, marriage, and other social issues. Historically, these congregations were predominantly white and middle- to lower-class, though not as uniformly as is often imagined. Many were founded within the last three decades, and they’re typically given to long sermons, contemporary worship, monthly Communion, and lots of lights.

These are the churches in which I’ve noticed what I would call a kind of loosening. This shift is largely unwitting, or at least unplanned. It is not consistent or ideological; it is not a program or platform; it’s not even conservative or liberal per se (and my goal here is not to render an overall positive or negative judgement on the change). This loosening consists of a broad relaxation of previously unspoken—or at least unwritten—social norms.

The most obvious example is attitudes about alcohol. For generations, American evangelicals were known to be highly suspicious of drinking, sometimes to the point of being teetotalers. This remained true through my teen years, and when I heard that Brother Joe or Sister Jane enjoyed a glass of wine before bed, it was whispered knowledge about private behavior. Joe and Jane were not drinking in public. They certainly weren’t microbrewing beer in their garage and handing out samples at small group.

Two decades later, so far as I can tell, this taboo on alcohol has all but disappeared. Professors at my private Christian university aren’t allowed to drink with students. But just a dozen years ago they weren’t allowed to drink at all, and this rule change is not an anomaly in evangelical institutions.

Now think of other timeworn taboos among American evangelicals: tattoos, dancing, gambling, smoking, even mothers working outside the home. “Cool” celebrity pastors are far from the only millennial and Gen Z evangelicals with tattoos. If I were to ask one of my devout Christian college students what theological reasoning informed their decision to sport multiple tattoos, they would not offer me careful rebuttals of their grandparents’ outmoded interpretation of Leviticus 19:28. They would give me a blank stare: What does God have to do with it?

Or consider entertainment. Churches and Christian parents continue to police the boundaries of appropriate content, but the window has widened considerably. Once upon a time, Disney movies were suspect. Onscreen sex, language, and violence were known to be dangerous causes of adolescent misbehavior. But now evangelicals’ viewing habits appear interchangeable with your average Netflix or HBO subscriber. Some even cast watching Game of Thrones or The Sopranos as a task of cultural engagement: I’m just doing my missional duty. If the gore, cruelty, and nudity offend your fundamentalist upbringing, so much the worse for you, weaker brother.

This loosening is happening within the church building too. The American evangelicals I have in mind traditionally looked askance at practices reminiscent of Catholicism—formal liturgy, vestments, sacraments, the church calendar, sometimes even creeds. These things were long seen as extrabiblical innovations that threaten to obscure the gospel, usurp the sovereign authority of Christ, or promote a lifeless, nominal faith.

Yet today I see an astonishing movement by all kinds of evangelical institutions toward retrieving these formerly Catholic-coded practices. Christians who once refused to acknowledge Easter as distinct from every Sunday’s celebration of the Resurrection now observe Lent. Churches founded on a principled rejection of creeds recite the Apostles’ or Nicene Creeds each Sunday. Churches historically committed to memorialism speak of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist (and they call it “the Eucharist,” not just “the Lord’s Supper”).

The loosening even extends to evangelical seminary curricula and sermon research. Professors and pastors reference writers and thinkers outside evangelicalism and even Protestantism, drawing on Catholic priests, medieval Orthodox monks, and patristic bishops and councils. Like all my other examples, this is not a shift in service of theological liberalism. In some cases—creedal recitation particularly comes to mind—it is a conservative change, a turn to catechesis as a bulwark against theological drift.

Now, I called this loosening a “generational shift,” and, in one sense, it is. But in my observation, it’s not only the under-40 crowd doing these things. If that were the case, we’d still have an important change underway, but it might be nothing more than the normal pattern of children unlearning their parents’ ways.

My contention, instead, is that it’s not just millennials and Gen Zers who are loosening. It’s their parents and grandparents too. Former teetotalers are now drinking; one-time Disney boycotters are binging Netflix; erstwhile skeptics of gambling are hosting poker nights.

If I’m right, this is a seismic shift, not business as usual. What’s going on? What has led so many evangelicals in such a brief span of time to shed so many social and liturgical taboos?

Before I venture four ideas, I should acknowledge that I’m doing some speculating here. I don’t have charts and graphs to back up my sketch or prove some explanation. But just as I’m sharing my observations to see if they’re widely recognizable, so I’m floating these four ideas to see if they resonate with Christians in other corners of American evangelicalism.

First, this loosening suggests to me that American evangelicalism’s many unwritten norms were not sustained solely by doctrine, congregational authority, or biblical teaching. Norms against drinking, tattoos, formal liturgy, and the like were extraordinarily powerful and uniform because of the ambient culture surrounding the church.

In many cases, that outside support included the state. It’s no coincidence that this loosening has occurred while laws related to “vice”—alcohol, divorce, drugs, and once-illegal sexual activities—have been falling like dominoes across the last half-century. Sometimes law is downstream from culture, sometimes upstream, but either way, the church is part of this social river.

Second, a less Christian and more secular culture creates new incentives and pressures on ordinary believers. If everyone in the non-Christian majority believes or does x, it becomes a conspicuous sign of Christian discipleship (or intransigence) to continue abstaining from x. This leads all believers, pastors included, to reconsider their commitments: Is alcohol, after all, forbidden by God? In black and white, chapter and verse? If not, then why am I suffering my neighbors’ or coworkers’ scorn? Besides, everyone always knew about Joe and Jane’s wine collection. Let’s go ahead and join them.

Third, when Scripture is ambiguous or disputable on some matter while the wider culture’s position is clear, the onus falls to pastors or the institutional church to convince congregants to reject that wider cultural norm. And what we have seen in recent decades is a decline of pastoral authority, the death of thick denominational identity, and a crisis of confidence in Christian institutions.

The elders say so or Pastor John knows best doesn’t cut it anymore. I can vote with my feet and join a church whose pastor says otherwise. Who is Pastor John, anyway? Isn’t he the same one who told me all believers are capable of interpreting Scripture for themselves? And that no authority except Scripture should decide matters of faith and morals? And that all matters on which Scripture is silent are “indifferent,” subject to personal conscience?

Fourth and finally, there are no sectarians in post-Christian foxholes. As counterintuitive as it may seem, the same forces leading evangelicals to start drinking, getting tattoos, and watching HBO are also leading them to say the creeds, receive ashes on their forehead, and read Pope Benedict XVI. When the world feels arrayed against faithfulness to Christ, you need all the friends you can get. Doctrinal differences that aren’t relevant to current cultural battles—think infant baptism, not theologies of sex and gender—can be overlooked in a pinch.

This is what I mean when I say that the loosening I see is no top-down, organized, ideological plan. It’s happening organically, all at once, sometimes in apparently contradictory ways. For this reason, it’s not easy to judge. I myself grew up without liturgy in the church or alcohol in the home; now I cross myself before prayer and enjoy a drink with my parents. On the other hand, I lament the colonization of believers’ leisure time by screens, whether streaming TV or apps like TikTok, as well as the accompanying laissez-faire attitude about onscreen content.

Whether each specific trend is good, bad, or yet to be determined, I do know this loosening has happened during the same years that church attendance has decreased while loneliness and congregations’ loss—or refusal—of authority over their members have increased. What looks like gain for some (perhaps less authority means less propensity for abuse) may be loss for others (wayward members who need strong medicine to get their lives on track).

Either way, American evangelicalism is changing, even as I write. What will it look like when this shift is finished? God knows.

Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry.

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Theology

Don’t Skip Chronicles in Your Bible Reading Plan

Carmen Joy Imes

What we can learn from the chronicler’s stories about the kings of Israel.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

To the dutiful Bible reader, Chronicles might seem a bit baffling. As we read, we might find ourselves wondering, Haven’t I read this before? The short answer is yes and no .

The books of 1 and 2 Chronicles retell some of the same stories of Israel and Judah that appear in the books of Samuel and Kings. But the chronicler also offers a fresh perspective on those years by incorporating new material and leaving other stories aside. His decision about what to keep and what to add is not arbitrary but intentional. And if we’re paying attention, we will find that the chronicler has a distinct message that we can learn from today.

First, only 50 percent of Chronicles is repeated material from Samuel and Kings. On the one hand, that’s a lot of overlap. But on the other, that also means that half of Chronicles is brand new material. Which means we cannot afford to overlook it!

And while the content of Chronicles overlaps with previous material, it emerged over 100 years later—giving the chronicler the benefit of hindsight and the opportunity to address a new set of challenges for his generation. The people of Judah had just returned from exile and were facing the massive task of rebuilding the temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem, which King Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed. This task profoundly shapes the backdrop to the books of Chronicles.

If you set Chronicles side-by-side with Samuel and Kings, you’ll find that the new material focuses on two primary topics: David and the temple. The chronicler spends extra time on the genealogy of David’s family and the details of David’s legacy. And although Kings focuses on the northern kingdom of Israel, Chronicles highlights the southern kingdom of Judah, where David’s descendants reigned.

Likewise, the chronicler adds bonus content about the temple. We read about David’s preparation of building materials and more details about Solomon’s building process and dedication. The chronicler also tells us about five distinct temple renovation projects spanning hundreds of years. We hear the prayers of various kings at the temple and find out which of the Levites is assigned to which temple-related tasks.

These two important themes—David and the temple—are evident from the beginning of the book in the genealogies listed. Now, it’s understandable to feel like skimming the nine chapters of genealogy that open the book. But if you do, you may miss out on significant clues about what details matter to the chronicler and why.

Despite their length, the genealogies do not offer an even-handed and exhaustive account of all 12 tribes of Israel. Rather, they focus especially on (you guessed it!) the family of David and the tribe of Levi, since their descendants were the ones primarily called to serve in the temple.

Another thing you might notice if you compare Chronicles to Samuel and Kings is that the chronicler leaves out most of the unflattering stories about David.

In Chronicles, David doesn’t take advantage of Bathsheba, nor does he lose his grip on his sons. It’s not that the chronicler is unaware of David’s failures; clearly, he has Samuel in front of him as he writes, since so many stories are taken from it verbatim. But, for the most part, the stories of David’s struggles simply don’t advance the chronicler’s purpose—with one exception. Since it’s the exception that proves the rule, let’s take a closer look at it.

Given the otherwise squeaky clean portrait of David in Chronicles, it’s surprising that the chronicler includes the story of David’s ill-advised census, when he ordered his commander to register their fighting men. His failure to trust God’s protection resulted in disastrous consequences for the nation.

To understand why this story appears in 1 Chronicles 21, we must pay close attention to the consequences for David’s actions. David had called for a military census against the advice of his commander, Joab. The exercise was both a flex of David’s power and a failure of trust in God’s protection. But soon after the numbers came in, David realized he had sinned and prayed for forgiveness.

In response, God allowed David to choose his own consequence from three options: “three years of famine, three months of being swept away before your enemies … or three days of the sword of the Lord—days of plague in the land, with the angel of the Lord ravaging every part of Israel” (1 Chron. 21:12). David chose the last option, deciding to put himself and the kingdom into God’s hands.

The plague was indeed devastating, with many unnecessary deaths due to David’s folly. But amid the judgment, Yahweh showed compassion on the nation by stopping his angel from destroying more people—in a moment strikingly like the one on Mount Moriah, when Abraham was about to kill his son Isaac and the Lord called for him to stop (Gen. 22:9–14). The narrator also tells us exactly where the angel of the Lord was when the plague stopped in its tracks— “standing at the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite” (1 Chron. 21:15).

This location is of paramount importance to the overall plot of the book. The threshing floor was where people would process their grain harvests by dragging heavy equipment over the stalks of wheat to separate the grain from the straw. When possible, they carried out this work on hilltops so the wind could blow away the chaff, leaving only the nutrient-rich grain behind.

So, David bought this prime hilltop threshing floor from the Jebusite, building an altar there to offer burnt offerings and fellowship offerings, to restore fellowship with Yahweh and thank him for his mercy. Remarkably, “the Lord answered him with fire from heaven on the altar of burnt offering” (1 Chron. 21:26)—a dramatic response echoing the time the tabernacle was built (Lev. 9:24). David logically concluded that this would be the perfect place to build the temple, saying, “The house of the Lord God is to be here, and also the altar of burnt offering for Israel” (1 Chron. 22:1). But, as you might remember, it was not David but his son who would take up this task.

The chronicler eventually draws these threads together in a dramatic flourish in 2 Chronicles: “Then Solomon began to build the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, where the Lord had appeared to his father David. It was on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite, the place provided by David” (3:1)—where God showed mercy to David by sparing the Israelites and the very spot where God likewise spared Isaac. The chronicler doesn’t want us to miss this!

Why tell this unflattering story about David in a book that offers an otherwise positive picture of him? The census debacle is essential because it ultimately leads to establishing the location of Solomon’s temple, which is the other key theme of the book. In this very place, God showed mercy to the Israelites and provided dramatic evidence of his presence and blessing.

The chronicler wanted to underscore for his own generation the importance of rebuilding the temple and regathering those called to serve in it, who were just starting over after returning to the land. They desperately needed a sense of continuity with the past and some reassurance that God’s presence would grace their community once again. And if we skip over the books of Chronicles, assuming they’re on “repeat,” we may miss God’s call to our own generation to prioritize temple-building.

We face a similar task today: How can the church rebuild after a global pandemic? How can we be restored after so many public scandals and deep divisions? Yet our generation’s task is not to rebuild a physical temple but to lean into our collective identity as the body of Christ. Especially in the West, where expressive individualism is so valued, the book of Chronicles offers a much-needed corrective. It’s not about me, it’s about the people of God doing the work of God in the world. And by underscoring our shared mission, we can rediscover our sense of purpose.

“Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone,” wrote the apostle Paul. “In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit” (Eph. 2:19–22).

This is not a solo project. As Paul and Sosthenes say elsewhere, “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst?” (1 Cor. 3:16). The yous here are all plural: “Don’t y’all know that y’all are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in the midst of all y’all?” No one goes on an architectural tour to admire a single brick, but instead to stand in awe of buildings made up of hundreds of thousands of well-placed bricks.

For us today, temple-building involves meeting together regularly, seeking God together, learning to love one another well, and discovering how to honor God together in our generation. No individual can demonstrate the fullness of God’s glory to a watching world alone. Rebuilding God’s house is a group project—and we all need each other.

Carmen Joy Imes is associate professor of Old Testament at Biola University and author of Bearing God’s Name and Being God’s Image. She’s currently writing her next book, Becoming God’s Family: Why the Church Still Matters.

- More from Carmen Joy Imes

Books

Review

The Church Fathers Belong in Creation Debates. But Handle Them with Care.

Michael LeFebvre

We can humbly seek their wisdom without treating them as mascots for one position or another.

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

On September 11, 2020, I found myself under a large tent, where 51 ministers of the Reformed Presbyterian Church had assembled for a COVID-era presbytery. They gathered to receive charges against me, initiating an ecclesiastical trial. I had published a book that affirmed the possibility of theistic evolution—a view regarded by some as dangerous.

Recruiting the Ancients for the Creation Debate

Andrew J. Brown (Author)

366 pages

$22.41

Through that process, I became personally (and painfully) aware of how heated Genesis 1 controversies continue to be. My trial was ultimately dropped, but I was compelled to resign my pastorate and leave that denomination.

I still love the Reformed Presbyterian Church and am grateful for my decades as a student and minister among its people. But I grieve that such passions for certain interpretations of Genesis 1 lead to damaged relationships and truncated ministries. It should not be so.

There are already plenty of Genesis 1 studies on offer (including my own, called The Liturgy of Creation). But what the church really needs are more resources to help us engage these discussions more responsibly. Andrew J. Brown’s latest book, Recruiting the Ancients for the Creation Debate, is just such a resource.

Brown, an Old Testament lecturer at Melbourne School of Theology, takes no sides on the question of whether the six days of creation are literal or figurative days. Recruiting the Ancients is not an attempt to solve creation controversies. Instead, it surveys what historic church authorities had to say on the subject, arguing that they shouldn’t be enlisted as straightforward allies of this or that contemporary position.

The book is based on Brown’s earlier book on the same topic (The Days of Creation: A History of Christian Interpretation of Genesis 1:1–2:3), which itself draws upon his PhD dissertation. In other words, the present volume is a highly developed, mature project.

Entering intellectual worlds

There are many facets to Genesis 1 controversies: theology, science, exegesis, and history, to name a few. Brown offers important guidance to improve our engagement with one of those areas: the witness of the early church fathers.

As he interacts with their ideas, Brown introduces readers to concepts like the world-week approach to Genesis 1, instantaneous creation, and double creation (where the creation of ideals precedes the creation of physical things), among other alternatives to a literal six-day model. Along the way, he describes different views on the relationship of God to time and Christological interpretations of the creation week, illustrating how Genesis 1 was interpreted to address the philosophical and pastoral needs of ages past.

The book’s 22-page introduction, while necessarily a bit dry in parts, outlines important points of methodology and the scope of the project. Most readers won’t be concerned with the finer points of a shift from the “history of ideas” movement to the “intellectual history” movement. But it is important that the author understands his field and transparently welcomes us into it.

Once the work is introduced, the rest of the book unfolds chronologically—and winsomely. Occasional dashes of humor remind us that theology does not have to be tense: “Origen sought to lead his ecclesiastical horse to exegetical water, but in the long run might only have brought the head”; “Augustine is the patristic equivalent of that athletic schoolmate who was always picked first for any sports team”; Aquinas’s use of “the phrase ‘twenty-four hours’ causes a little flutter of joy in some readers’ hearts.”

The book covers prominent early church figures like Clement, Origen, and Augustine; medieval theologians like Aquinas; and Protestant torchbearers like Luther, Calvin, Wesley, and the Westminster Divines.

Brown’s opening chapter on Origen is representative of his process. Origen famously espoused a non-literal view of the creation days. But all sides tend to paint him on cardboard. Cherry-picking quotes flattens Origen into a poster boy to champion or disparage. Instead, Brown helps us enter into Origen’s intellectual world. “At the center of Origen’s thought,” Brown explains, “was his ontology, that is, his concept of ultimate reality, a concept framed under the influence of his early immersion in the incipient Neoplatonism of the Alexandrian intellectual scene.”

That’s some pretty heady stuff! But understanding the ancients requires stepping into another world. Brown shows us Origen’s world at a level within reach for nonspecialists. Overall, his approach helps us replace the cardboard cutout with a three-dimensional, thinking human being.

Brown asks the question, “Can the fan of nonliteral interpretation safely rally Origen to his cause?” He answers, “Origen does offer a serious precedent for a figurative interpretation of the creation days, with the proviso that we should study his interpretive stance and decide how closely we identify with it.” Two pages of analysis follow, exploring Origen’s figurative views and the pastoral and philosophical aims influencing those conclusions. In other words, we cannot offer pat answers to “recruit” a complex thinker like Origin.

Readers seeking to pigeonhole historical Christian leaders will be disappointed. Brown does not shy away from pointing out instances where their views roughly align with a literal, six-day framework, or other views debated today. But he does much more than that, and we are better served learning what thinkers like Origen sought to accomplish within their own times so we might genuinely learn from them , rather than merely quoting (“recruiting”) them.

Responsible dialogue

Brown’s book is rich, insightful, and an example of historical responsibility. The past is not a mine where we dig for gems that suit our own settings and agendas; it is a different world to step into and learn from. “Until we experience the shock of the unfamiliar in any source more than about a century old and have scratched our heads [over it],” Brown writes, “we have probably not read it carefully enough.”

The book does have some shortcomings. Brown focuses on how church fathers viewed the creation days, whether literal or nonliteral, which is a fairly narrow topic. That limited focus certainly makes his project more manageable. But creation controversies today focus as much, if not more, on the nature of Adam. Given the aim of Brown’s project, it could have been strengthened by greater attention to the church’s historic views on this subject, even if including them might have proven overly ambitious.

It is also striking that the book features so many church fathers but no church mothers. Historically, of course, women have not had much voice in theological discourse. Furthermore, Brown’s stated focus is on those church leaders who are prominently cited in modern creation debates, and men like Augustine and Luther are cited most. So it is understandable that this book focuses exclusively on the voices of church men. But it would be edifying to hear from historic church women on creation as well.

These shortcomings are not really flaws in the book as Brown has framed it, and he can’t be faulted for not writing the book one might have preferred. But they do indicate the need for further inquiry into historic church views on Scripture’s account of creation.

All told, Brown has provided an important gift to the church in this volume. Perhaps most importantly, he has modeled the possibility of charitable, responsible creation dialogue. In my own work on creation, I consulted church fathers like Augustine, Origen, Luther, and Calvin (while my opponents drew heavily on the Westminster Standards). I am inspired by Brown’s work to go back and revisit my own use of the church fathers.

And Brown’s sensitivity to the need for fruitful conversation leaves me encouraged that, despite the contentiousness marking too much creation debate (including in my own case), a better path is possible.

Michael LeFebvre is a Presbyterian minister and a fellow with the Center for Pastor Theologians.

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News

AI Preachers and Teachers? No Thanks, Say Most Americans.

Adam MacInnis

American Bible Society study finds majority don’t trust technology with spiritual matters.

Jeremy Wells / Lightstock / Edits by CT

Ask ChatGPT how to improve your spiritual life, and the natural-language processing artificial intelligence chatbot has plenty of suggestions.

But Americans are skeptical that artificial intelligence, or AI, has much to offer in the way of reliable religious guidance.

Sixty-eight percent of people don’t think AI could help them with their spiritual practices or “promote spiritual health,” according to the latest research from American Bible Society (ABS). Fifty-eight percent say they don’t think AI will “aid in moral reasoning” and only one out of every four people say they feel optimistic about the impact the technology will have.

“Americans are more fearful than hopeful about artificial intelligence,” said John Farquhar Plake, an ABS program officer and editor-in-chief of the State of the Bible series. “People don’t know how AI will change the culture—but they’re mildly uneasy about it.”

ABS surveyed about 2,500 people for its annual report on Scripture engagement and related topics. While technology has been a regular part of the survey, this is the first year ABS dedicated a set of questions to the topic of technology that performs tasks traditionally associated with human intelligence.

AI is rapidly evolving, and currently includes everything from Amazon’s “virtual assistant” Alexa to chatbots running large language models that can pass the bar exam. People are pushing the technology further every day, and some Christians who work in tech are excited about the possibilities—dreaming of algorithms that might one day help people grow, learn, and go deeper in their faith.

“It is not difficult to imagine how pastors and church leaders can use these tools for the work of daily ministry,” A. Trevor Sutton, a Lutheran pastor and the author of Redeeming Technology, recently wrote. “It won’t be long before generative AI technology is woven into the background of our church lives.”

And yet a majority of Americans are uncomfortable with that idea. Questions about using AI to understand the Bible or connect to God reveal that many feel “a great deal of uncertainty” about the advancing technology, Plake said.

Few religious people sounded excited about the idea of replacing their current devotional practices with technology-enhanced Bible studies.

“People who are most connected to the Bible and have had their lives deeply impacted by studying and understanding the Bible are somewhat skeptical that that experience can be replicated by a machine learning model or a generative AI model,” Plake said. “Practicing Christians who maybe know their pastor or minister or their priest very well, they’re skeptical that that personal touch and that real relational engagement with God’s Word and God’s people can be replicated by a technology like this.”

People who are less engaged with a religious community and less likely to spend time reading Scripture were more optimistic about the potential of AI, according to the survey. Those who want to read the Bible but are not currently doing so—a group ABS calls the “movable middle”—can imagine that the tech might give them a place to start.

It can be daunting, Plake pointed out, to pick a book with more than 700,000 words for the first time and look for the answers to life’s biggest problems. For someone like that, AI could be a godsend.

“You can ask an AI, ‘Where did Jesus say …’ and ‘Give me a summary of that,’” Plake said. “Then open the book or open your favorite Bible app, turn to that page or that chapter and verse and read it for yourself.”

Derek Schuurman, a computer scientist who teaches at Calvin University, said there are some obvious ways that AI will contribute to people’s spiritual lives. The technology is a great tool for Bible translation and is already being used to accelerate translation projects. AI can provide transcriptions of sermons in real time, producing captions for people who have hearing impairments. There are probably thousands of other uses that churches will find too, from pairing sermon themes with worship songs to scheduling volunteers for church activities.

Schuurman has been getting a lot of questions about AI, though. Many people have utopian fantasies about the potential benefits and many fear a kind of Frankenstein scenario, where the thing that scientists created turns on humanity and becomes an existential threat. He doesn’t think either of those views is right.

“The Bible is unequivocal in its rejection of anything in creation as either the villain or the savior,” Schuurman told CT.

Instead, the computer scientist thinks Christians should focus on the role they have to play in shaping the technology and establishing the moral framework for its use.

“The church, I think, has something to say about justice and about loving our neighbors and about cultivating spiritual disciplines and practices in our lives,” Schuurman said.

Some of the anxiety about AI might just be a stage of the technological development, according to Brad Hill, the chief solutions officer at Gloo, a technology platform for ministry leaders.

“It’s actually quite normal at this stage in a new technology for people in the church, people of faith, to have reservations,” he said. “We saw this with the internet, we saw this with broadcast TV, even the printing press.”

And there are reasons for that, Hill said. When things are changing quickly, people don’t know what they will lose. Right now, the developing technology produces programs that seem to possess a lot of knowledge but lack wisdom.

Hill said he wouldn’t personally rely on ChatGPT for spiritual input, for example.

“I trust ChatGPT to help me with recipes or administrative tasks,” Hill said, “but I would take its input with large grains of salt when it comes to anything spiritual.”

But Hill and Gloo have chosen to pursue the positive potential and encourage Christians to find ways to use AI rather than avoid it.

“AI is really important and arguably could be one of the most important technology advances in our generation,” he said. “We have a moral imperative as believers to understand how we might use it redemptively and how we might use it for good.”

So far, though, most Americans are skeptical that’s really possible.

- More from Adam MacInnis

Theology

A New Era of AI Is Here, and the Church Is Not Ready

Russell Moore

In the uncanny valley of the shadow of data, we should fear no evil—and prepare for a very different future.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

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

In the past several weeks, two events occurred that are going to change our futures. One of them was the launching of OpenAI’s new artificial intelligence program, GPT-4o, just ahead of several competitors who will do the same in a matter of weeks. The other was the defrocking of a robot priest for teaching that baptisms could be done with Gatorade. I’m afraid the church is not ready for either.

The more talked-about happening was the OpenAI announcement, complete with videos of the AI program laughing, seeming to blush, telling jokes, seeing and describing things in real time, and even singing songs made up on the spot (to whatever degree of emotion and enthusiasm was demanded).

Far less culturally noticed was the fact that just a few weeks before, the Roman Catholic apologetics platform Catholic Answers reined in an AI chatbot called “Father Justin,” which was designed to help people through questions of doctrine and practice.

People started to get upset when Father Justin started claiming to be an actual priest, capable of hearing confession and offering sacraments, and when it started giving unorthodox answers to questions, such as whether baptizing a baby with Gatorade would be all right in an emergency (the magisterium says no).

Now Father Justin is just “Justin,” a “lay theologian.” Catholic Answers acknowledged to critics that they are pioneering a new technological landscape and learning—as the whole world will—just how difficult it is to keep an artificial intelligence orthodox. If my Catholic friends thought Martin Luther was bad, wait until the robots start posting theses to the cloud.

Before one laughs at Catholic Answers, though, one should think about the now-quoted-to-the-point-of-cliché anecdote of 19th-century preacher D. L. Moody’s response to a critic of his evangelistic practices: “But I like my way of doing it better than your way of not doing it.” Behind the scenes, almost every forward-thinking ministry of any kind is worried about how to be ready for an AI-transformed world, imagining what it would have been like if Luther had not been ready for a Gutenberg era or if Billy Graham had not been ready for a television age.

One AI expert told me recently that he and others are realizing that people will say to an AI what they would never admit to a human being. Doctors know, for example, that when asking a patient, “How much do you drink each week?” they will get one answer from a potential problem-drinker while a chatbot will get what’s much closer to an honest answer.

The same is true when it comes to spiritual searching, this expert said. The person who would never ask a Christian person, “What will happen to me when I die?” or “Why do I feel so guilty and ashamed?” is far more likely to ask such questions to an intelligence that’s not another person. In some ways, that sounds oddly close to Nicodemus, who came to ask questions of Jesus at night (John 3:1–2).

“The question is not whether people will be searching out chatbots for big questions like that,” the expert told me. “The question will be whether the only answers they get are spiritually wrong.”

The real challenge may prove to be not so much whether the church can advance fast enough to see an artificial intelligence world as a mission field—rather, it’s if it will be ready for the conflicted emotionality we noticed even in most of our responses to the OpenAI announcement videos themselves.

The videos provoked for many people an almost moon landing–level of wonder. As I said to my wife, “Watch this. Can you believe how it tutors this kid on a geometry problem?” I realized that, one day, my reaction would feel as “bless your heart” naive as the old videos of television anchors debating each other on how to pronounce the “@” symbol in the then-new technology called email.

At the same time, though, the videos kind of creeped a lot of us out. The vague feeling of unease is described by psychologists as “uncanny valley.” It’s the reason lots of people would be terrified to be trapped inside a doll-head factory or in a storage shed filled with mannequins. Human beings tend to respond with dread to something that’s close enough to seem lifelike but doesn’t quite get there. Something our brain wants to read as both “human” and “non-human” or as both “alive” and “dead” tends to throw our limbic systems off-kilter.

Print and radio and television and digital media have their effects on the communication of the gospel, as Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman warned us. But what those media retained in common with oral proclamation was a connection, however tenuous, to the personal. One might not know who wrote a gospel tract one finds in the street, but one does know there’s a human being somewhere out there on the other side of it.

On the one hand, I am almost persuaded by the argument that one could put AI in the same category as the quill Paul used to pen his epistles or the sources Luke compiled to write his gospel. AI programs are designed by human beings, and the Word of God comes with power regardless of the format.

Even so, that doesn’t seem to be the whole story. Do people experience the “uncanny valley” unease here just because it’s a new technology to which we’re not yet accustomed? Maybe. Or maybe there’s more to it.

A few weeks ago, the Sketchy Sermons Instagram account featured a cartoon rendering of a quote from the comedian Jaron Myers: “I’ve seen too many youth pastors be like ‘Be careful on TikTok, it’s just girls dancing in swimsuits’ and I’m like bro … It’s an algorithm.”

The joke works because we live now in an ecosystem where everything seems hyper-personalized. The algorithms seem to know where a person’s heart is better than that person’s pastor or that person’s spouse or even that person’s own heart. If you like knitting content, you see knitting content. If you like baby sloth videos, you see baby sloth videos. And if you like bikini-dancing—or conspiracy theories or smoking pot—you get that content too.

That hyper-personalization is ironically the very reason this era seems so impersonal. Even if a machine seems to know you, you can’t help but realize that what it knows is how to market to you.

The gospel, though, cannot be experienced as anything but personal. If the Word of God is breathed out by the very Spirit of Christ (1 Pet. 1:11), then when we hear it, we hear not just “content” or “information” or disconnected data curated by our curiosities and appetites. We hear him.

How does one convey that in a world where people wonder whether what they are hearing is just the inputs from their own digital lives, collected and then pitched back to them?

That so many are queasy when they see a friendly, helpful, seemingly omniscient AI might tell us something about ourselves. Despite the caricature, philosopher Leon Kass never said that “the wisdom of repugnance” is an argument, for or against anything. What he wrote was that when we feel some sort of revulsion, we should ask why. Sometimes it’s just cultural conditioning or the fear of the unknown—but sometimes it’s “the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate.”

Should we conclude that God is able from these chatbots to raise up children for Abraham? How do we make sure that, when people are thirsting for living water, we do not give them Gatorade?

What I do know is that no new technology can overcome one of the oldest technologies of them all: that of a shepherd leading a flock with his voice. Yea, though we walk through the uncanny valley of the shadow of data, we should fear no evil. At the same time, we have to be ready for a very different future, and I’m not sure we are.

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

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Billy Graham’s US Capitol Statue Unveiled

Diana Chandler - Baptist Press

The late evangelist is one of just four Americans who have received the nation’s three highest congressional honors.

Franklin Graham speaks at a ceremony where a statue of his late father Billy Graham was unveiled on Thursday.

Kent Nishimura / Getty Images

Salvation in Christ Jesus was offered in National Statuary Hall May 16 at the unveiling of a statue of the iconic late global evangelist Billy Graham, which has John 3:16 and John 14:6 carved in its base.

“Friends, God’s grace is undeserved, but through Christ it is freely given. And it is by trusting in God’s sacrifice that we are saved,” US Sen. Ted Budd (R-NC) said in the unveiling ceremony. “If you’ve not made a decision for yourself, I hope, I pray, that you will.”

US House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper and members of Graham’s family joined the North Carolina Congressional delegation in unveiling the statue that replaces that of early 20th-century North Carolina governor and staunch white supremacist Charles Aycock.

“Today, we acknowledge that he is a better representation of our state than the statue it replaces, which brought memories of a painful history of racism,” Cooper said. “Not that Rev. Graham was perfect—he would have been the first to tell us that. … But he believed, as many of us do, that there is redemption, and he gave his life to remembering that message.”

US Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) honored Graham as a trailblazer in race relations.

“During an era in the 1950s when leaders in the South openly embraced segregation, it was Billy Graham who spoke out against it,” Tillis said, describing Graham as having been a staple in the Tillis family. “He insisted in his sermons that they be integrated. He shared his platform with Black ministers, including one named Martin Luther King Jr.

“Rev. Graham was blessed with the gift that bridged differences,” Tillis said, “and brought us all together.”

In his prayer, US Senate Chaplain Barry Black described Graham’s life as “the light of morning at sunrise on a cloudless day, and like the brightness after rain that brings the grass from the earth.”

Billy Graham statue in the US Capitol

The late evangelist’s son Franklin Graham, president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse, said his father would have been uncomfortable with such laud, but thanked leaders for bestowing the honor.

“He would want the focus to be on the one he preached,” Franklin Graham said. “He would want the focus to be on Jesus Christ the Son of God.”

His father believed the Scripture inscribed on the statue’s base, Graham said, and indeed the entire Bible “cover to cover. He didn’t understand it all, but he certainly believed it all, every word of it.”

The Southern Baptist evangelist led hundreds of thousands to Christ through a decades-long global ministry of evangelistic crusades, authored 33 books and counseled several US presidents. He and Ruth, his wife of 64 years until her death in 2007, had five children and numerous descendants.

Speakers extolled Graham’s life and legacy, remembering him as the “leading ambassador of the Kingdom in our lifetime,” as Johnson put it, and as a man, in Cooper’s words, who “treated all with dignity and respect.”

Sculpted by Charlotte-based artist Chas Fagan, Graham’s remarkable likeness stands 7 feet tall, bronzed and holding an open Bible in his left hand, his right gesturing palm-down above the page.

“His Bible is open specifically (to) Galatians 6, verse 14,” said Johnson, who himself held Billy Graham’s study Bible during his closing remarks.

The Southern Baptist from Louisiana noted that imprisoned men at Angola in his home state made the plywood casket Graham was buried in after his death in February 2018 at the age of 99.

“Rev. Graham humbled himself to care for the poor, and prisoners, the forgotten, the lost and the least of these, exactly what the Scripture tells us to do,” Johnson said. “He believed that even the poorest sinner could be a co-heir with Christ. And those men who made his casket had come to believe that message too. And they believed it through the influence of Billy Graham and the Graham family.”

The North Carolina General Assembly approved the statue in 2015. Graham joins Civil War-era N.C. Gov. Zebulon Vance in comprising North Carolina’s Statuary Hall statues. Each state is allotted two.

Graham joins three other Americans who have received the nation’s three highest honors of the Congressional Gold Medal, lying in state and having a statue in the Capitol, Johnson noted. Others are Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Ronald Reagan, and Civil Rights leader Rosa Parks.

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