We Can’t Worry Our Way to Peace

When we take matters into our own hands, we forget the Lord.

Illustration by Keith Negley

I was on an early morning flight after spending the prior afternoon and evening staring at a screen of delayed flights. I was sleep deprived and a little on edge after a long time away from home.

That is no excuse for what happened next.

The plane landed, and the seat belt sign went off. The family behind me jumped up to rush down the aisle, their teenager skipping in front of me. In the Cuss family, no one skips the line. I stuck my arm into the aisle to block the rest of the family from passing, like I was Gandalf. None shall pass.

“We’re all trying to get off this plane,” I said to the family. “Let’s wait our turn!”

They had words with me that I cannot publish here and pushed past my arm in spite of my immense triceps strength. I was fuming. My seatmates were visibly upset. As I got off the plane, the flight attendant pulled me aside and told me that the teen girl was having a panic attack and that I blocked the family from helping her.

The family was not rude; they were desperate.

How did I, a former chaplain trained to notice physiological signs of stress, miss that this young lady needed help? How did I let my core value of courtesy block my capacity to see what was really going on?

It is remarkable how fragile we can be when something triggers us. Sometimes, we’re triggered when our core values get violated. More often, we get triggered when we don’t get what we think we need.

Lack of courtesy is obviously a trigger for me, but so is being misunderstood, disappointing someone, not knowing the answer when I should, and about 400 other things. Some of our triggers are legitimate, but most of them are based on false assumptions and a false sense of need, so we spend much of our time in a triggered or reactive state.

When we don’t get what we think we need, we become disconnected from ourselves, from others, and from awareness of God’s presence. After that young lady ran up the aisle, I was flooded with reactivity because my false need of courtesy was not being met.

Reactivity is generated by assumptions we make that are not true. I was operating out of assumption and unable to see reality. Rather than see that this young lady needed help getting off the plane, all I could see was This family is rudely skipping the line, I must intervene.

Jesus ran into assumptions all the time in his ministry. I am struck by his words in Luke 7:44 to Simon the Pharisee: “Do you see this woman?” Just as I couldn’t see the woman on the plane, Simon couldn’t see the woman in his house who anointed Jesus’ feet. He couldn’t properly connect to her or to the God who was in the room with him, because he was operating out of assumption. He was reactive, and when we get reactive, we take matters into our own hands. We forget the Lord.

How often is God calling us to relax into his presence so we can see what is really going on—and see people for who they really are? It is difficult to do.

I am struck that one of the most frequent commands in Scripture is “Remember the Lord.” How hard can it be to remember that God is with us?

Some people in the Bible completely miss God even when he is right next to them. “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it,” says Jacob after a surprising and intense encounter with God (Gen. 28:16).

Later, in the New Testament, we have Cleopas and his unnamed companion walking toward Emmaus on what would become known as Easter Sunday. They are literally walking right alongside Jesus, but Luke records that “they were kept from recognizing him” (Luke 24:15–16). Some explain their lack of recognition as divine orchestration. I’ll add another interpretation: They were reactive and didn’t know it. It is nearly impossible to notice God’s presence when you are filled with reactivity.

When we are reactive, we no longer feel safe to be ourselves. We protect ourselves from outside threats. After I preach a sermon, I tend to feel vulnerable, and like a golden retriever, I crave a pat on the head. It is quite pitiful, but is a real challenge for many preachers. If someone comes up after a sermon with criticism, I will say or do whatever the person wants in order to get past the situation.

This isn’t always about being quiet. Sometimes we flatter or don’t fully share our thoughts with someone. In those moments of self-protection, I don’t see God as my refuge and strength; I see myself in that role.

Whether we move toward self-righteousness or self-protection, the common denominator is self. This is what Jacob and Cleopas and every follower of God has in common: We get caught up in ourselves, we get triggered, and we forget the Lord.

How might you relax into the Lord’s presence? It isn’t difficult, but it takes intentionality. Here are some ways you can not only notice but also diffuse your reactivity and be aware of God’s presence:

Open your calendar and look for the next meeting that is likely to generate reactivity in you. Edit your calendar title and add, in all caps, “GOD WITH ME, GOD AHEAD OF ME, GOD WITH US” to it. Set your calendar event to remind you within an hour of the event. When the alarm prompts you, pause, pray, and remember the Lord.

Later, as you enter the room to meet the person, remember that God is already in the room ahead of you. God is also with that difficult person. This simple prayer of awareness has done wonders for my reactivity. I use it before I walk out to preach, when I start a staff meeting, and when I find myself trying to worry my way to peace.

You can also get clear on what is yours to carry, what is God’s, and what is someone else’s. Sometimes we get reactive because we overfunction. We carry more than God asks of us. A proper self-examination can put to order the reactivity and confront me when I try to do God’s job.

Just as God did not need me to be the courtesy police on that flight home, you also might be carrying a burden that God is inviting you to entrust to him—or at least you might need to be reminded that you are his colaborer. It isn’t all on you.

Steve Cuss is the host of CT’s podcast also called Being Human.

This article appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "We Can't Worry Our Way to Peace".

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Church Life

The Man Who Made Global Methodism Possible

Daniel Silliman

Keith Boyette prepares for retirement as the denomination gathers formally for the first time.

Keith Boyette at the Wilderness Community Church in Spotsylvania, Virginia, on July 24, 2024.

Photography by Stephen Voss for Christianity Today

You just don’t expect the pastor to be a lawyer.

Rusty Dennen didn’t know a lot about church. He didn’t grow up religious and was generally pretty skeptical of Christianity. He only showed up at Wilderness Community Church one Sunday in 1999 because his wife and daughter wanted to go.

But he thought he understood a few things. Like ministers are ministers. And lawyers are lawyers.

Then he met Keith Boyette, a pastor-lawyer in Spotsylvania, Virginia, who had actually argued a bunch of cases before the state supreme court, and he had to reconsider.

“He’s got a laugh that shakes the building,” Dennen said. “He’s got this really, really crazy sense of humor that he uses in his sermons, and he’s lawyerly—he’s got that lawyer experience—and he uses that to really make his points.

“I’m thinking, There’s something about this funny, rotund, lawyerly pastor. It’s a special gift.”

Boyette’s gift would be transformative for Dennen, who is today a committed Christian and a member of the Global Methodist Church (GMC).

It would be transformative, in fact, for all Global Methodists and for Global Methodism itself. The pastor-lawyer played an essential role in the founding of the new denomination, which is today the 16th largest Protestant church in America and convenes its first General Conference in September.

Boyette’s legal expertise and pastoral commitments built the bridge for traditionalists who wanted out of the discord and chaos of the United Methodist Church (UMC).

“I don’t think anyone can fully appreciate all of the details and behind-the-scenes decisions and structures that have to be put in place for a new denomination,” said Cara Nicklas, chair of the Global Methodist transitional leadership council. “I don’t see how it could have been done without Keith.”

There were, of course, many faithful Methodists involved. Pastors shepherded their congregations through hurt and confusion. Organizers nurtured networks of connections. And theologians raised a flag for orthodoxy and rallied people around the core values of Methodism.

But what the new denomination absolutely had to have to come into existence was a legal expert. It needed a minister who was also a lawyer.

“I don’t think they could have pulled it off without Keith,” said Jim Holsinger, a retired US Army reservist and expert in public health who once served on the UMC’s top court. “You had to have Keith. He brought that unique combination of being a deep man of faith but also an exquisite legal mind. He was the catalyst.”

At 71, Boyette is ready to retire. He says that as soon as the GMC votes to ratify the denominational structure that the transitional leadership put in place, he can step down.

“I think I was called by God for a specific role,” he told Christianity Today. “God has given me certain abilities and gifts and graces—the abilities and gifts and graces to navigate a dysfunctional system—and they were appropriate to a specific moment.”

The story of that calling started at another specific moment: February 4, 1991, on Interstate 195 in Richmond. Boyette was driving home from his downtown office at Hirschler, Fleischer, Weinberg, Cox, and Allen, where he was an up-and-coming litigator specializing in corporate law.

The 37-year-old wasn’t thinking about contracts, claims, lawsuits, depositions, mediations, or trials though. Boyette was praying.

He had been a Methodist since childhood. He was baptized as a baby, and his first memory was watching his sister get baptized when he was three. The following year he professed his faith in Jesus at vacation Bible school, during a flannelgraph lesson about the shepherd with one lost sheep.

More recently, however, Boyette had become convicted that there were areas of his life where he didn’t trust Jesus. He had sort of said to God, Thanks, but I got this. He was working on that, praying about it during his daily commute.

“Increasingly, I surrendered different parts of my life to his lordship and trusted him more,” Boyette said. “John Wesley would call that sanctification.”

On this day, something happened.

“The Spirit of the living God filled the car,” Boyette recalled. “And I heard an inner voice that said, I want you to leave the practice of law, and I want you to be a pastor. My spirit immediately responded to his Spirit with a yes, and I was filled with a joy that I cannot put into words.”

One of the partners at the law firm said Boyette should see a psychiatrist. A bunch of his colleagues said it was a midlife crisis.

“I thought he was kidding,” said John Vaughan, who worked at the firm with Boyette. “People wouldn’t just quit. There were always people who were changing firms. Or people would decide they didn’t want to be litigators and they’d practice a different kind of law. He was the only person I ever saw leave the law and go to seminary.”

It was clear to Boyette that he had heard from God, though, so he quit. And with the support of his wife, Pamela—which astounds him to this day—he left his promising legal career and moved his family to Wilmore, Kentucky, so he could enroll at Asbury Theological Seminary.

His first church assignment was Fletcher’s Chapel, a rural congregation outside Fredericksburg, Virginia. Boyette found he had a gift for reaching unchurched people, and the congregation grew from about 80 to around 200 in four years.

At the same time, Boyette grew concerned about the state of Methodism—the spiritual health of the denomination. Many UMC churches reported membership of three or four times the actual attendance, he said, and no one was going after those people like a shepherd who’d lost a bunch of sheep.

“Everything was focused on institutional preservation. ‘Are you checking the boxes?’” Boyette recalled. “There was no sense of commitment to the primary calling of the church to witness to people, to bring them to faith in Jesus, and then disciple them.”

The UMC at the time was shutting down about 150 congregations every year. Going against the trend, Boyette asked his bishop for permission to plant a new church. In 1999, he opened Wilderness Community Church at an elementary school in Spotsylvania.

Wilderness attracted people like the skeptic Rusty Dennen; a lapsed Catholic named Larry Welford; and Janet Ayers, whose family had no church background at all.

“I liked Keith’s message,” Ayers told CT. “He’s earthy. You can tell he’s really smart, but he also talks to you in a language that makes sense. And there’s some humor in it too.”

Church members said Boyette approached everything with a creativity developed through years of crafting arguments and negotiating settlements. Welford remembers working with the pastor on the budget for a new church building. They had to figure out how to cut construction costs by about $300,000, but Boyette didn’t seem stressed, Welford recalled.

“He’s like, ‘Let’s look at that a little bit,’ and then he comes up with ways to do it,” Welford said. “Unconventional solutions are pretty standard for Keith.”

While Boyette was coming up with solutions to the good problems of a growing church, he was also getting a crash course in the complexities of the Methodist legal system. In 2000, he was elected to the UMC’s Judicial Council, the church’s highest court.

He was soon the UMC’s leading conservative expert on Methodist church law. He continued pastoring Wilderness week by week, while across the country traditionalists in the denomination started relying on him for advice.

“Keith just knew the Book of Discipline. He knew it as well and oftentimes better than anyone else,” said Walter Fenton, former director of strategic resources for Good News, a traditionalist caucus in the UMC. “He was among a handful of people who really understood some of the key rulings from the Judicial Council.”

After Boyette finished his term on the council, he was tapped to join and then lead the board of Good News. The pastor-lawyer also returned to the Judicial Council as an advocate for traditionalists, making the legal case against the election of a lesbian bishop.

Karen Oliveto was made bishop over 12 western states in 2016—even though she was married to another woman and the Book of Discipline said that “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” couldn’t be ministers. An attorney representing the Western Jurisdiction argued that a same-sex marriage was not an “avowal” of homosexuality and that the word should only be understood to mean a direct confession to church authorities.

Boyette opposed that argument, successfully. But then Oliveto wasn’t removed from office.

Boyette disagreed with progressive, LGBTQ-affirming theology. But he was especially dismayed by what he saw as a rejection of church authority and the defiance of the agreed-upon systems of Methodist government.

“People who wanted to change the church’s position tried to do it through legislative means, and they were repeatedly defeated,” he told CT. “Then they turned to the judiciary. They wanted the judiciary to order the changes. Then they turned to what I would call ecclesial disobedience: ‘We’re no longer submitting.’”

In the spring of 2017, Boyette accepted a position as president of the newly formed Wesleyan Covenant Association (WCA), an alliance of churches committed to contending for traditional, orthodox Methodism and preparing, if worst came to worst, for the division of the UMC.

WCA leaders appreciated Boyette’s legal knowledge and felt he had the right character to become the national leader of the traditionalist movement. He was a strategic thinker, they told CT. He also wasn’t a bomb thrower and wouldn’t let conflict fester in his heart and turn into animosity.

“I never sensed in him a spirit of war,” said Carolyn Moore, one of the WCA leaders who hired Boyette. “He wanted to minimize pain. He wanted to minimize drama. He was just looking for solutions—pragmatic and extraordinarily intelligent.”

Boyette also wanted to retire.

He had served 19 years as pastor at Wilderness, and 20 seemed like a nice round number to finish on.

“I fought kicking and screaming not to become president of the WCA,” he said.

Boyette sat in front of his computer praying and arguing in his head with God about whether to submit his application for several hours before he hit send. Ultimately, his sense that he was called to the role was not as dramatic as when God told him to stop being a lawyer and become a minister, but it was a calling nonetheless. He had to be obedient.

As president of the WCA, Boyette was asked in 2019 to join leaders from the conservative, progressive, and centrist factions to negotiate a plan for UMC separation. A bishop from Sierra Leone thought the continued fights over sexuality and denominational order could not go on. A number of American bishops agreed. They said the loudest voices could be given an exit and that would calm the controversies that had long roiled the UMC.

Traditionalist leaders, however, saw this as the beginning of the end. And it was, for them, possibly a good end—an amicable separation.

“There has to be a way Christians can disagree and separate,” Boyette told the WCA. He pointed to biblical examples of good division that they could learn from and even emulate. “We can be like Abraham and Lot, Paul and Barnabas, going different ways,” he said.

In the room with a professional mediator and 15 leaders representing the spectrum of Methodist views, however, the traditionalists didn’t need a biblical scholar. They didn’t need a theologian. They needed a lawyer.

And they had one.

“No matter which side of the issues you fall down on, Keith’s one of the best people who could have been in that position,” said Vaughan, Boyette’s lawyer colleague. “He’s not like a lawyer on TV. They get aggressive and ugly. He’ll be unfailingly courteous, and he’ll try to understand your side. He’ll stay calm. He’ll listen. And he’ll fight for what he thinks is right.”

Boyette first negotiated for a waiver of the UMC’s trust clause. Congregations that wanted to leave—whether progressive or traditionalist—shouldn’t have to pay the denomination for buildings they’d already paid for with years of passed collection plates, he said. After two days, everyone agreed.

Then he negotiated a division of denominational assets.

Finally, they had a big argument about the vote that would be required for a church or conference to exit the denomination. The traditionalists wanted a simple majority. The other side said two-thirds. Boyette proposed they make it 57.5 percent.

“If that isn’t a lawyer talking—‘Let’s split the baby, 57.5 percent’—I don’t know what is,” Boyette said.

His gift, combining pastor and lawyer, made him a successful advocate. At the end of negotiations, the group agreed to legislation they would propose at the General Conference. They called it the Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace through Separation.

Then COVID-19 happened. The Methodists did not meet to vote on the plan in 2020. The meeting the following year was also canceled. Traditionalist leaders told pastors and churches to be patient and hang on—they’d get a chance to approve the separation terms at the next General Conference.

But then that one, in 2022, was also canceled. UMC authorities cited issues with international visas and put a vote on the protocol off until 2024.

“When the protocol came out, I was so hopeful,” Nicklas, also a member of the WCA council, told CT. “I felt like the traditionalists had compromised more than was fair, but this was our chance to show the world that we could separate amicably. Then when support of the protocol was winning, the postponements started coming.”

Traditionalist leaders decided they didn’t believe the stated reason for the delay and couldn’t accept that denominational leaders were acting in good faith. In 2022 they announced the formation of a new denomination: The Global Methodist Church.

Boyette, still president of the WCA, took on another role: chair of the GMC’s transitional leadership council. Here again, he was asked to use his training as a lawyer. Congregations and conferences started to look at leaving without a protocol and realized they would have to go through multiple complicated legal processes, involving both Methodist rules and state regulations.

They’d have to arrange disaffiliation votes and payments for their properties, figure out how to change their names legally, change them on all their documents, and then deal with issues like pastors’ pensions.

“How do you navigate a church in a denomination that looks like it’s going to fall apart? You call Keith,” said Fenton, the Good News director who joined the staff of the GMC as deputy connectional officer. “Keith functioned as a pro bono attorney, coaching a half dozen churches a week. I lived in fear he’d get sick and I’d have to do it; and I’m not a lawyer.”

With the first General Conference of the GMC this September, the end of the pastor-lawyer work is in sight for Boyette. It’s time, he says, to pass the responsibilities of leadership on to other people. It’s time for a change.

Some things will stay the same, however. When Boyette is no longer leading the traditionalist Methodists, he’ll continue attending Wilderness Community Church, sitting in a pew on one side, saying good morning to people whose lives were changed by that church plant. He will still think the church should be making disciples.

“He’ll be at the men’s group,” said Rusty Dennen, who was surprised so many years ago that a pastor could be a lawyer too. “We will talk about our lives and God, and Keith has these questions from John Wesley—I think there are 22—and he’ll ask us, ‘How did you encounter God this week?’”

Daniel Silliman is news editor at CT.

This article appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Pastor’s Heart, Lawyer’s Mind".

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Testimony

My Deconstruction Turned to Deconversion. But God Wasn’t Anxious.

Lindsay Holifield

He pursued me patiently across decades, as I passed from fundamentalism to progressive faith to another faith altogether.

Photography by Lynsey Weatherspoon for Christianity Today

The voice from the pulpit rang out, echoing through the large Baptist sanctuary as the preacher claimed to speak on behalf of the Almighty. “Look,” he told the crowd, his voice projecting an unwarranted amount of confidence, “if you have an issue with my message, then you have an issue with God himself. I am merely relaying his words.”

I was nine years old and sitting exactly four rows from the front, and I felt incredibly small and fragile before such weighty words. They conjured an image of a stern deity, someone impatient with my restless squirming in the stiff wooden pew. This god would tut-tut at my desire to dance down the aisles and disdainfully shake his head at my ink-stained hands, blue-black from drawing on my bulletin.

I spent most of my childhood within Christian fundamentalism, supposing that God was like the preachers who shouted angrily at us each Sunday, with graying hair and ill-fitting suits and trembling voices expressing deep heartbreak over our hell-bound state. At best, the god I’d come to know was distant and disapproving. At worst, he was terrifyingly capricious and violence-prone.

At 15, when I began struggling with a severe eating disorder, I asked hard questions, pushing back on unsatisfying answers about the supposed hope that Christ offered. But questions were not especially welcome in a religious system predicated on having tightly controlled, black-and-white answers to the world’s problems.

My experience launched me down the path of what many would term “deconstruction,” though the word was not yet popular at the time. In my life, deconstruction was a commitment to finding something that could satisfy what I craved: a better word for the suffering and pain in this world.

Like many fellow questioners at that time, I read books like Blue Like Jazz and Velvet Elvis and followed Rachel Held Evans’s blog religiously. During my time in a Methodist campus ministry, I found breathing room in a belief system that did not claim to have all the answers and that allowed me to care about people on the margins of society. But ultimately, this new faith system fell short. It broadened my compassion for humanity, but it did not satisfy my core longing.

My current pastor speaks of God’s non-anxiousness about our journeys, which allows us to be non-anxious with other people in our lives. I mention this as a caution, because the next part of my story is what so many fear for their loved ones who are deconstructing.

The day I started graduate school, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that my belief system no longer included Jesus. I sat in my car in the driveway of my new Nashville home and wept, knowing how many people I was letting down. I wanted so badly to believe, even if solely for their sake, but I couldn’t. My deconstruction had turned to deconversion.

lindsay holifield for Christianity Today

As I processed my grief over a faith renounced, I started attending a synagogue on Friday nights for Shabbat services. I found solace in Hebrew liturgy that I could barely understand as I sought a God I wasn’t entirely sure existed. Over the course of the next year, I studied alongside a rabbi and began to observe Jewish holidays. Before long, I had fully converted to Reform Judaism, where I remained for three full years before Jesus interrupted my life.

My non-anxious and faithfully Christian friend Anne called me on an average Wednesday afternoon. Without realizing it, she broke something open within me around the person of Jesus. There was nothing earth-shattering about our video call in a Starbucks parking lot. Anne did not attempt to convert me, and I did not bring up Jesus. Instead, she respectfully shared her beliefs, which included how Jesus had moved in her journey.

This kind of sharing was nothing unusual. Typically, I would smile politely while maintaining my differences. When I hung up on this occasion, though, I realized I was weeping. As I swiped at the salty tears streaming down my face, I could not rationally explain what was happening. It seemed like my very cells were responding to something so deep it had bypassed my intellectual armor.

I spent the following three days researching and reading about Jesus, trying to figure out why I suddenly could not shake him. I spent countless hours scouring library bookshelves looking for stories like mine, stories of pain and God-seeking and wandering the desert of various belief systems to find some semblance of peace. I kept hoping these books would tell me what to do when Jesus interrupts someone’s life without warning. I hoped this insistent pull was merely a fluke, or a craving that I could satisfy by reading enough books or listening to enough podcasts. But it wouldn’t let up. The resolution I craved was a person, and that person was chasing me down.

Honestly, I was angry. “I think I’m pretty settled on this topic!” I would yell to no one in particular, gesturing to my Star of David necklace. But the pull inexplicably remained.

On a Friday night in December a few years ago, I sat in a small closet in my Alabama apartment, hugging my legs to my chest. There, I encountered the living God. This was not the aggressive blinding light that Paul met on the road to Damascus. Nor was it a heady theological argument to convince me that Jesus is God. Instead, it was a quiet but insistent knowing, a lifting of the veil to see that Jesus was the same God who had been seeking me out over the years. He came tenderheartedly, like a compassionate shepherd scooping up a wounded, battered sheep and holding her close to his heart.

The richness and depths of theological understanding only came after. It was many months before I began to grasp the beauty of the grand story of God’s work to make all things new. But in the moment of encountering Jesus in my closet, I was aware that I needed to embrace him and that my life was wholly bound up with his.

The next six months were lonely. I told no one in my life about meeting Jesus because I knew the response would be mixed. I snuck out of my shared apartment each Sunday morning to attend church services. Most weeks, I ran to the bathroom mid-service, suffering panic attacks when a word or phrase brought back the voices of my childhood pastors.

Encountering the biblical God did not bring my life ease, and it cost me multiple communities and friendships. But the more I beheld the person of Jesus—the Second Person of the Trinity, not a stained-glass caricature—the more I knew he was worth selling everything I owned to follow.

I have always sought a faith of substance, something that could come against the powers of evil in this world and not be shaken or knocked over. I wanted a better story that could truly speak to humanity’s cry for justice with a clear, strong voice. I wanted good news that was good news, not bland moralism or fragile hope.

In Jesus, I have finally found the answer I sought over the years—or rather, I should say that he found me. In him, I’ve learned that God is not a fearful, trigger-happy deity. Nor is he a bland deity with nothing to say to the evil in the world, like the narratives I heard in spaces of deconstruction. Instead, he loves his people so much that he refuses to abandon them to inevitable destruction, giving his very self to bring us back to life.

If God can pursue me over decades, patiently meet me in moments of seeming godlessness, and ultimately resurrect my heart in a cramped closet, then I can trust him to be alive in the spiritual journeys of others who seem far off from him. If God can bring me to see Jesus in a sudden moment of conversion, then maybe my sight and imagination are simply limited when I despair. My story screams of God’s long-game redemptive work that was out of sight for so long.

I hold Jesus to be the answer, and the most beautiful one that exists. But if you cannot yet affirm that beauty, I trust that God is not anxious about you. Therefore, I am not either.

Lindsay Holifield is a writer and artist living in Birmingham.

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

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Ideas

A Vision for Repair

Bonnie Kristian

CT Staff; Columnist

We don’t fix things anymore—relationships, democracies, or socks. That’s a problem.

Illustration by Han Cao

The needle moves quickly, back and forth and back again, making a pattern I find almost intelligible. It’s an Instagram video in the genre that has come to fascinate me: repairs. Similar clips show rougher work—a stonemason restoring a 900-year-old cathedral, a handyman reviving a neglected home room by room—but in this video, the task is fixing a moth-eaten sweater.

In mere moments, the woolen looks good as new. The hole has disappeared, the weaving so exactly matched by an unseen mender that I’d take it to be digital trickery had I not watched every stitch.

These repair videos aren’t quite honest, of course. They’re practiced and edited, glossing over the less-than-perfect bits and skipping entirely the discipline and tedium required to master a craft. But they do strike me as a rare case of a message resisting its medium: On a platform that reflects so well our culture’s tendency to seek the newer, more exciting, easier option, repair videos choose the inverse.

Though we see it most obviously in social media, the consumerist tendency against repair is rooted deeply in our culture and institutions. I see that inclination in myself. My children’s socks get holes, and I do not darn them. I throw them away, alongside so many other products made to be disposable or planned for quick consumption and then obsolescence. (This becomes glaringly obvious once you have kids. Of the making of many plastic gizmos there is no end.)

I see this tendency in the tech world in our fascination with artificial intelligence and virtual or augmented reality, especially when they serve as means of escapism. Instead of repairing a real relationship, you can make new friends in the metaverse, friends who’ll never ask to crash on your couch or cry on your shoulder or inconvenience you in any tangible way. Instead of working on your house, you can conjure a dream kitchen using AI. Instead of grappling with some obstacle or inadequacy in the real world, you can retreat into a digital realm where you’ll face no such friction.

In politics, I see this tendency in our apocalypticism and accelerationism. I see it in the rejection of negotiation, cooperation, and compromise in favor of jeremiads about the looming end of our democracy (and not a few calls to hasten its demise).

This isn’t confined to any one political camp. To borrow the broad brush of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, writing in early 2023, the American left has succeeded in its project of critique to the point of discovering “there isn’t some obvious ground for purpose and solidarity and ultimate meaning once you’ve deconstructed” everything.

Meanwhile, the right likes to talk about repair, about making America great again. But our political right wing is no longer conservative in the literal sense. After its own deconstruction efforts, Douthat argued, it has no idea “how to do a restoration, how to roll back alienation and disaffiliation and atomization.”

Thus we see Robert Kagan at The Washington Post announcing a “Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable”; a Trump voter declaring to Politico that he has “no trust” in the American system; and the widespread impulse to destabilize and denounce because so much of our society—in the phrase of a landmark 2022 essay from Tablet editor in chief Alana Newhouse—“is broken beyond repair.”

I see this tendency against repair in the church, too, in a mode of reformation that never moves beyond nailing theses to the door.

Several caveats: First, repair is not stagnation or nostalgia (let alone false nostalgia). It is not necessarily a return to the status quo. Fixing something properly may mean redesigning how it works.

Mending may be visible—an embroidery of flowers over moth-eaten holes instead of a seamless weave. To oppose the tendency against repair is not to reject everything new, prescribe a universal solution, or deny the reality of brokenness. It is rather to have a bias toward the restoration of good things. It is a tendency toward repair over replacement, resolve over resignation, conservation over chaos, staying over leaving, and building up over tearing down.

Motivations underneath this tendency against repair vary widely, and some are far more sensible and sympathetic than others. Sometimes we are merely wasteful or careless—undoubtedly me with the socks. But sometimes we have a true incapacity to repair, born of ignorance or exhaustion or want. Sometimes we seek the fresh, easy thing so as to indulge in distraction or fantasy, and sometimes we reach for newness out of frustration or hope, disgust or righteous anger.

Moreover, repair is not always the right choice. Sometimes things really are broken beyond repair, subjected to the laws of physics, human error or finitude, and the desolation of sin. A marriage can’t be repaired when one spouse won’t repent of abuse. We can’t haul up the Titanic and set it on a second voyage. In Pittsburgh, where I live, the Tree of Life synagogue understandably chose to demolish the building that was the site of the 2018 antisemitic mass shooting. Our Founding Fathers deemed the Articles of Confederation unworkable and replaced them with the US Constitution.

Finally, the line between repairing and replacing or rejecting is not always bright. Sometimes you might replace a part to repair the whole. Sometimes you must debride a wound, cutting away irreparably damaged flesh, before the rest can heal. Sometimes you must deconstruct before you can reconstruct, or doubt before you can believe.

The tendency toward repair is not exclusively Christian, but it deeply resonates with the story of salvation. God has a tendency toward repair.

You can see it in how the earliest Christians spoke of the Atonement, describing God redeeming, reviving, recapitulating, and reconciling us (2 Cor. 5:16–21).

That repetition of the Latin-derived prefix re- is no accident. Each of these ways of explaining Christ’s work in his cross and resurrection has a similar connotation of going back to some lost good: freedom, life, order, love. Each is a kind of repair.

In Isaiah 58, repair is a sign of the restoration of God’s blessing, of the people’s reunion with God after repentance from their sin. The prophet records God saying,

If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness. … The Lord will guide you always … Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins and will raise up the age-old foundations; you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls, Restorer of Streets with
Dwellings. (vv. 9–12)

This theme continues into the New Testament, where Peter preaches that the time is coming “for God to restore everything, as he promised long ago” (Acts 3:21).

Paul writes of creation being “subjected to frustration,” waiting to “be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:20–21). So we also “wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies” (v. 23). James’s final exhortation in his letter is a call to the church to bring back anyone who “should wander from the truth” (5:19–20), and the Book of Hebrews speaks of our redemption from death itself (2:14–15).

Repair is there at the end, too, as the Anglican theologian N. T. Wright has reminded a new generation of Christians. “The God in whom we believe is the creator of the world, and he will one day put this world to rights,” Wright preached in 2006, drawing on Isaiah 35, Luke 10, and the Book of Revelation.

That solid belief is the bedrock of all Christian faith. God is not going to abolish the universe of space, time, and matter; he is going to renew it, to restore it, to fill it with new joy and purpose and delight, to take from it all that has corrupted it.

Indeed, Wright added, this is a work God has already begun: He “has come with healing and hope in Jesus Christ, has picked up the battered and dying world, and has bound up its wounds and set it on the road to full health.”

Repair is one way we can imitate Christ, one way to prefigure the resurrection and renewed creation.

Or it could be, anyway, if we did it.

“Sometimes the task of rebuilding,” Newhouse wrote in an earlier Tablet essay, “is so daunting that it can almost feel easier to believe it can’t be done.”

I suspect our tendency against repair is self-perpetuating. The more we feel everything is broken—that trust is a fool’s errand, that our institutions are irreversibly rotten, that dictatorship is inevitable, that demolition is all we can do—the more likely we are to resign ourselves to decay, to let wounds fester, to forget techniques of mending, and perhaps to actively exacerbate chaos. The problem is cumulative.

This is how even Christians end up “watching the walls of a healthy society come down, with little vision or motivation to repair them,” as reconciliation scholar Brenda Salter McNeil describes in Empowered to Repair.

Much of McNeil’s book is a practical engagement with the biblical repair story of Nehemiah, in which the titular leader, through prayer and diligence, leveraged his favor with a foreign king to rebuild the ransacked walls of Jerusalem. This attention to practice and skill—to all the learning and labor those Instagram videos skip—is part of what we need to cultivate a tendency toward repair. But the vision McNeil mentions is necessary too.

When I first began thinking about repair, I cast around to see who else was talking about the topic in evangelical circles (McNeil’s book hadn’t yet been published).

The voice I most often encountered was that of Patrick Miller, a pastor, author, and podcaster based in Columbia, Missouri, whom I’d briefly met a few years ago.

“I’ve been hesitant to embrace the idea [of] ‘cultural repair,’” Miller wrote on social media last year, because it risks being mistaken for a call to return to wrongheaded or outright evil patterns of history. “I don’t want to repair segregation or Jim Crow,” he added.

But if we’re thinking about institutions—especially the church—talking in terms of repair makes sense. He continued:

Institutions are houses. Places we live in. To repair a house that’s been neglected or intentionally deconstructed, is to make a space for future living. Anyone familiar with home repair knows you have to remove asbestos and lead (i.e. the problems of the past) to make the house livable.

Miller expanded on this thesis in an essay for Mere Orthodoxy, where he likewise spoke of vision. American evangelicals have plenty of vision for movements and institutions, Miller argued, but it is overwhelmingly a negative vision rather than a positive one (or, I would add, a tendency against repair rather than toward it).

Even many who in theory advocate for moving from critique to creativity, Miller contended, have nothing positive to offer in practice. That is, as he told me in an interview, we are very good at articulating what we’re against but have a harder time explaining what we’re for, what we’re trying to build, what kind of life we’re pursuing with one another.

Maybe that’s because we do not know where or how to begin. My hope for my own local church includes a heavy focus on catechesis, thick community, and deliberate boundaries on digital distractions that impede thoughtful life together.

But wanting these goods is not the same as knowing how to build and maintain them. And when I think about trying to pass this positive vision on to younger generations in a tech-obsessed, atomized culture—to teach at a congregational (or even movement) scale that these are goods worth repairing—well, suffice it to say I feel blessed not to be in pastoral ministry.

That pessimism is why one piece of Miller’s own positive vision intrigued me: He thinks that Zoomers—members of Gen Z, born roughly from 1997 to 2012—could be our era’s Nehemiahs, starting to rebuild the American church after a century of decline, distortion, and deconstruction.

I’m skeptical. After all, Zoomers grew up in the same repair-averse culture as the rest of us, and if we think about characteristic contemporary challenges to our faith (smartphones not least among them), surely the youngest adults, the “anxious generation,” have gotten the worst of it.

Miller agreed when we spoke that “Zoomers drew the short straw,” with their childhoods distorted and their very brains rewired to the point that we might deem them past repair. But he argues that at least a portion of Gen Z is more aware of the impact of isolation on their social development. They understand that they were made for community because they know what it feels like to be alone, he said.

“I have seen in pastoral ministry that it’s often people who experience the greatest healing and transformation who have the greatest ability to offer that to others,” Miller told me. “I think about Jesus when he talked about those who need a healer: It’s the sick who know that they need a healer, not the well” (Luke 5:31).

He sees less interest in the younger generation in “negative visions and burning things down” than in building and repairing institutions, including the church. There’s a receptivity to a positive vision, if we have one to offer, for “how we pray, how we read, how we treat one another, how we treat our neighbors”—and, Miller added, how “we train within ourselves a readiness to do good.”

A church that relearns how to repair would still have sins in need of exposure, wounds in need of debridement, errors in need of deconstruction. But for every thesis we nail to the door, we might fix a broken hinge or putty an old crack. We might be known less for our mutual antagonism and more as repairers of broken walls. With time and faithfulness, maybe we can pass on to future generations a hard-won tendency toward repair.

Bonnie Kristian is editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today.

- More from Bonnie Kristian

Church Life

Making Space for ‘Yearners’

Daniel Taylor

Some in our churches live in the borderlands between committed faith and disbelief.

Hannah Lock

In recent decades, an alphabet soup of terminology has arisen to describe the smorgasbord of trends that include faith and doubt, growing secularism, people leaving faith and the church, eclectic spirituality, growing indifference or hostility to religion, the rise of agnosticism and atheism, and so on. The labels have proliferated: nones, dones, nonverts, New Atheists, unaffiliated, unchurched, dechurched, exvangelicals, and the like. I would like to add one more: yearners.

Yearners show up in several of the above categories, but they are a demographic unto themselves. Yearners are not hardcore skeptics. They live in the borderlands between fully committed faith and full disbelief—just inside the border or just outside, only God knows which. One of their defining qualities is restlessness. Another is psychological and spiritual pain. As Blaise Pascal, a patron saint of yearners, put it, “Seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied.”

Yearners are attracted to faith, but they are also wary of it. They want more belief, more of God than they have, but obstacles stand in the way—some external, some internal. Some people call these people “doubters” and suggest they should simply get over their issues and accept what the Bible says. It’s not unlike an adult standing behind a frightened child at the end of a high diving board who says, “It won’t hurt, kid. Quit stalling. Just jump.” Easy to say, but not so easy to accomplish for the jumper. Yearners deserve better. God calls to them and the church needs them.

I want to distinguish between struggling to believe and disbelief, which is why I believe a fairer and more accurate term for those contesting within themselves for faith is yearners. I derived the term from an observation made by author Leonard Kriegel in an interview with journalist Dan Wakefield: “I wouldn’t call myself a believer but a man yearning for belief—which is why I also wouldn’t call myself a nonbeliever.”

This is a position for which I have great respect and sympathy. In fact, I’ve been something of a yearner myself. As a young man, I made my search for God not a matter of faith but a misguided search for certainty, a matter of abstract, intellectual inquiry. Momentum kept me in the faith, but doubt kept me near the edges.

Simply put, yearners are earnestly searching for a meaningful relationship with transcendence—most often with the God of the Bible. The desired fruits of that relationship with God include peace, belonging, meaning, significance, stability, confidence about the future, and more—all wrapped up in the concept of love given and received.

But this yearning is often associated with some level of anxiety or impeded hopefulness. Yearners’ desire for God, sometimes as diffuse as simply a desire for “something more,” is sincere but is also frustrated because it is left unfulfilled. Something always seems to be in the way, blocking yearners from what—or who—they desire.

These roadblocks might include intellectual objections, familial or other biographical wounds, church wounds, societal pressures (like negative stereotypes of religion in general and Christians in particular), one’s psychological makeup (such as fear of change, risk aversion, or indecisiveness), and so on. Uncommitted yearners, especially, are held back by the haunting question “What if it isn’t true?” Ultimately, choosing God and faith in God involves the will, and human wills are notoriously vacillating (James 1:8).

I believe that yearners fall into two general categories: the committed and the uncommitted. Committed yearners can still affirm faith in God even though they struggle significantly with doubts, and uncommitted yearners cannot commit to faith even though they may believe in God’s existence (as a great percentage of nonreligious Americans do) and wish for a relationship with God, often intensely.

The key distinction is not in the questioning, which is common to both groups and to all expressions of faith, but rather in the commitment. Doubts about God’s existence, God’s goodness, God’s presence, and God’s caring are the common stuff of faithful lives throughout the Bible and church history. Troubled relationships with God—from David to Peter, Paul to Pascal, Søren Kierkegaard to Mother Teresa—are as common as weeds in a garden. They are part of being human.

Doubting, by definition, is having misgivings about truth claims. It is a morally and philosophically neutral term, and its usefulness depends on what is being doubted, for what reasons, in what spirit, and with what results. Such doubt is often depicted heroically (sometimes foolishly so) in both Christian and secular circles.

But I learned one thing early in my childhood about doubting: Don’t do it in church. In my experience, doubting—or even just asking too many questions—was equated with disbelief, and, well, we all knew the consequences of disbelief. For many believers, faith is the melody and doubt the counterpoint—sometimes harmonious and sometimes dissonant. Genuine faith is compatible with doubt and hard questions, yet it is not compatible with a lasting unwillingness to commit.

Both committed and uncommitted yearners have questions besides the purely philosophical ones. They ask moral and practical questions such as “What about the failures of Christians—in history and now?” “What about hypocrites and charlatans and scoundrels within the church?” “What about how I was treated—by family, friends, or church people?” “Why doesn’t God make himself plain?”

The Bible has stories about both committed and uncommitted yearners. The most famous of the first is found in Mark 9. A man begs Jesus to heal his son, preceding the request with a caveat—“if you can” (v. 22, NLT throughout). Jesus does not ignore the doubt, answering with a mild reprimand, “Anything is possible if a person believes” (v. 23). The father gives a yearner’s reply: “I do believe, but help me overcome my unbelief!” (v. 24).

This father’s response was at the same time honest, desperate, hopeful, and committed. He knew intellectually that it was possible that Jesus might not or could not do what he so desperately wished. He was honest enough to admit his mix of belief and skepticism, even to the one who could reject him for it, but was committed enough both to accept Jesus’ assertion that all is possible with belief and to ask Jesus to strengthen his own belief. He struggles with faith but commits to it anyway. (Did he become a follower of Jesus? We don’t know.)

The Bible also has examples of uncommitted yearners. One is found in the story of the rich young ruler in the very next chapter of the Gospel of Mark. The ruler asks Jesus, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (10:17). But when Jesus answers his question in a way he doesn’t expect or like, he turns away, presumably because he prizes his rule-keeping and his wealth above the call to follow Christ.

For modern examples of yearners, consider poets. Poets have a unique ability to explore with powerful yet precise language the hinterlands and boundaries of faith. Consider the story of yearner-poet Anne Sexton—a flamboyant and controversial poet of the mid-20th century. She was a nonideological feminist, a taboo breaker, and a woman who was fiercely honest (including about her own failures) and reckless with her own life. She desperately wanted to both believe in God (which she did) and commit to a life of faith (which she often couldn’t).

God is a familiar figure in her poems, sometimes in passing but often as the main focus. One of her many published collections is titled The Awful Rowing Toward God. Each word of the title is revelatory. God is the goal, but rowing is not easy.

In the first poem in that collection, “Rowing,” she says,

God was there like an island I had not rowed to,

still ignorant of Him, my arms and my legs worked …
I am rowing, I am rowing

though the oarlocks stick and are rusty …
but I am rowing, I am rowing.

As her title indicates, this venture is “awful” in all the senses of the word. It is full of awe and also of awfulness, the self-perceived awfulness of her life—full of addictions, mental breakdowns, promiscuity, divorce, abortion, self-promotion, and self-hatred—contrasted with the awesomeness of God and of the attempt to find him.

And then that ambivalent word toward—a rowing toward God, yearning for God, and for the embrace and restoration of God, but only “toward,” for the poem ends this way:

This is my tale which I have told,
If it be sweet, if it be not sweet …
This story ends with me still rowing.

Sexton had not arrived at the island by the end of the poem, written late in her life. Yet the last poem in the Rowing collection, “The Rowing Endeth,” shows her finally arriving and playing a game of poker with God. She believes she has won because she holds “a royal straight flush,” but God “wins because He holds five aces.” An impossible hand, of course. God has cheated, which is then accompanied by his laughter in which all nature and then the speaker herself join.

Is Sexton suggesting that God’s cheating by doing the impossible—playing an unannounced “wild card”—is actually for her benefit? If God wins, does he win her soul, the prize for which the game is played? Or if she wins, does she seemingly defeat God and thereby lose everything for which she has yearned? And what does that “wild card” fifth ace signify?

The last stanza of this final poem in the Rowing collection suggests that the wild card is God’s love:

Dearest dealer,
I with my royal straight flush,
love you so for your wild card,

that untamable, eternal,
gut-driven ha-ha
and lucky love.

If this is truly Sexton’s last word on the matter—and if such a revelation was sustained by some level of enduring commitment—then perhaps she was a committed yearner after all. I hope this is so. But in other poems and statements, Sexton so often expresses a desperate faith and then takes it back that only God knows (and only God needs to know) where she finally stood in the end.

After many suicide attempts throughout her life, Anne Sexton finally succeeded at the age of 45—not long after writing these poems. I do not say she killed herself because she did not commit to God. I only say that she yearned intensely for God, which is not the same thing as having faith in God.

A few years before her death, she said, “There is a hard-core part of me that believes, and there’s this little critic in me that believes nothing.” Which part of her won in the end?

In an earlier poem, “With Mercy for the Greedy,” she contemplates
a crucifix:

True. There is
a beautiful Jesus.
He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef.
How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in!
How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes!
But I can’t. Need is not quite belief.

“Need is not quite belief” is a heartbreaking description of the uncommitted yearner. Before you think disparagingly of anyone called a doubter, think of Anne Sexton.

For every yearner-poet such as Anne Sexton whose final landing place is ambiguous, there are examples of committed yearners. Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, R. S. Thomas, and Christian Wiman are among them.

Traditionally, the church has not done well by yearners, at least not my churches. My childhood Christian subculture called people with too many questions “doubters” and mistakenly equated doubting with disbelief. The more progressive wing of the church, on the other hand, is often happy to welcome doubts but at its extremes fails to defend even the central tenets of biblical faith.

All yearners need to be shown understanding and compassion as well as encouragement to accept the risks and rewards of commitment to the God of the Bible.

Sexton once met a priest who offered an example of exactly that. In an interview with Gregory Fitz Gerald, Sexton recounted her conversation with the elderly priest about her struggle to believe in God:

I said to Father Dunn, “Look, I’m not sure I believe in God, anyway.” And he was sitting there just reading my poems to me, and he said, “Your typewriter is your altar.” I said, “I can’t go to church. I can’t pray.” He said, “Your poems are your prayers.” He was not a particularly intellectual person, but he was wise enough merely to read my poems back to me, to fill me with hope. As he left me he said “… Come on back to the typewriter!” And I said, “Pray for me.” He said, “No, you pray for me.”

I don’t believe the priest was saying, “Writing poems will save you.” I think he was saying, “Your poems are the vehicle by which you are honestly searching for God. God is using them in your life. Keep writing. Keep searching.” Note her response to the priest’s words: “hope.”

Alamy

Anne Sexton (1928–1974)

During my own long season of yearning as a young man, mine was an attenuated, theoretical faith at best. Providentially, I discovered writers like Pascal, Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, Solzhenitsyn, and Flannery O’Connor. They helped me with my intellectual questions, but more importantly they modeled lives of commitment, combining the mind, heart, and will. As did important friends and mentors, including my wife, Jayne.

The Christian church can do better by its yearners. It needs more people like Anne Sexton’s priest, someone who combined wisdom, compassion, and humility.

Here are a few brief, unelaborated suggestions.

Change the vocabulary. Using the doubter label suggests a disease that can be “cured” through proper “treatment.” It sounds like an accusation or a legal charge rather than an invitation to dialogue.

Listen to yearners sympathetically before you preach to or argue with them apologetically. Before you “solve” their problems, respect their stories. Ethical storytelling demands that we must listen to others’ stories if we expect them to listen to ours. If we listen to them with understanding and compassion, uncommitted yearners may be more likely to commit.

Treat a yearner as a Thomas, not a Judas. Thomas stayed committed despite his understandable doubts. Thomas chose to stay within the community. And the community chose to keep him with them. In fact, it was within the community that Thomas had his questions answered. A yearner seeks to be a committed Thomas—so offer help (Jude 1:22).

Finally, live out the Bible that you say you believe. Consider that the way you live could be the evidence of faith a yearner is seeking. Live out your faith, individually and collectively, in such a winsome, servant-hearted, truthful, and grace-filled manner that the yearner will find the gospel attractive and convincing.

Whenever you doubt or listen to the doubts of others, think not of doubting Thomas but of courageous Thomas, who tradition says spread the gospel as far as India where he was martyred. Think of Pascal, think of Mother Teresa, think of Anne Sexton, think of me—yearners all.

Daniel Taylor is the author of The Myth of Certainty, The Skeptical Believer, and four novels. His next book is Believing Again: Stories of Leaving and Returning to Faith (2025, Wipf and Stock).

This article appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Not None, Not Done".

- More from Daniel Taylor

Theology

Some of Christianity’s Biggest Skeptics Are Becoming Vocal Converts

Nathan Guy

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

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

Illustration by Jan Robert Dünnweller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ideas

Calling Is More Than Your Job

Steven Zhou

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

Illustration by Simone Noronha

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Church Life

Called to Kenya’s Chinatowns

Sophia Lee

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

Photography by KC Cheng

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photograph by KC Cheng for Christianity Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photograph by KC Cheng for Christianity Today

Daive Njuguna

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photograph by KC Cheng for Christianity Today

Wanjiku Maina

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was one barrier broken down.

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

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

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

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

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

Photograph by KC Cheng for Christianity Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photograph by KC Cheng for Christianity Today

Chinese immigrant restaurant owners frequently employ local Kenyans.

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

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

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

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

Njuguna walked up to the stage with a nervous grin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sophia Lee is global staff writer at CT.

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

- More from Sophia Lee

Books

Review

Tracing the Bible’s History Through Time and Space

David W. Kling

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

Illustration by Mark Pernice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- More from David W. Kling

Books

Review

Sincerely, Your Spiritual Mentor

Uche Anizor

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

Illustration by Weston Wei

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- More from Uche Anizor

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