The Chinese Christian Who Helped Overcome Illiteracy in Asia

Yan Yangchu taught thousands of peasants to read and write in the early 20th century.

Yan Yangchu (right)

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

In 1918, Yan Yangchu (Y. C. James Yen) set sail from the United States for France despite the possible threat of submarine attacks during World War I.

The recent Yale University graduate, along with 40 other Chinese Christian students, had been invited by the YMCA to provide social activities for 30,000 Chinese laborers in France who were working in munitions plants, doing farm work, loading military supplies, and building or repairing roads.

The ship ahead of Yan sank, and the one behind was torpedoed, but his ship arrived safely. Reflecting on this event, he wrote:

They put their studies aside, and risked losing their lives to the enemy’s submarine attacks to come here to be servants of Chinese laborers … because their hearts have been treated and changed by the Doctor Christ; thus they all have high standards of social ethics, love their fellow countrymen, and want to serve them.

In the northern French city of Boulogne, Yan became so busy writing letters for dozens of homesick, illiterate men each night that he asked for volunteers who would be willing to learn 1,000 basic Chinese characters.

His eager students skipped their dinners so as not to miss class, even after digging trenches all day. Yan began writing and printing the Chinese Workers’ Weekly to give them practice reading.

After 35 of the 40 laborers passed the simple test of writing a letter home and reading the Weekly, Colonel G. H. Cole, who was head of the Chinese Labor Corps and had been with the Canadian YMCA in China for 12 years, ordered Yan to start literacy programs in other French cities.

Yan asked him to send the other Chinese YMCA students to Boulogne to observe his classes for a week. After they returned to their own camps, they started teaching the 30,000 Chinese laborers how to read.

Yan began to recognize the potential power of peasants to build a nation. He made a vow that upon his return to China, he would devote the rest of his life to the “release of the pent-up, God-given powers in the people” through mass education reform. Little did he know that his work would stretch beyond China and impact people around the world.

Yan was born on October 26, 1893, in Bazhong, a small town in northern Sichuan Province. His father, who was a scholar, poet, and writer, named his youngest son “Yangchu,” meaning “the start of the sunrise,” to convey the family’s desire to build a new China.

After his father accepted a job teaching Chinese to missionaries in the local China Inland Mission (CIM) station, the missionaries urged him to send ten-year-old Yan to a CIM school in Baoning, 90 miles from home. Founded by the English missionary Hudson Taylor, CIM is now known as OMF International.

The headmaster, William B. Aldis, did not lecture about the Bible to his students but set an example of a pious life for the 20 boys in the school. Although Aldis’s Chinese was difficult to understand, Aldis inspired Yan to become a follower of Christ.

After four years, Aldis encouraged Yan to attend a middle school run by American Methodists in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan. Afterward, Yan attended Hong Kong University, where he became friends with Fletcher Brockman, the national secretary of the YMCA in China from 1898 to 1915.

In the summer of 1916, Yan headed across the Pacific to Oberlin College in Ohio, but a Yale professor on the ship encouraged him to go instead to Yale because it had good teachers and libraries.

“The Christian tone here is high and inspiring—the chapel, the worship, the Christian professors, the Christian students make the whole Yale Christian in spirit and in practice,” Yan wrote to Brockman about his life at college.

After World War I and Yan’s time in France ended, Yan returned to the United States in 1919 to study history and politics at Princeton. Upon graduating with his master’s degree in 1920, Yan returned to China and married Alice Huie, daughter of a Dutch American woman and a Chinese pastor in New York City.

For several years, Yan co-led the National Association of Mass Education Movement (MEM), which organized literacy programs in several cities in China. One of the volunteer teachers who participated in this program was Mao Zedong, who later wrote his Thousand Character Primer that introduced Marx and attacked the militarists, bureaucrats, and capitalists.

Yan’s larger goal was to establish a comprehensive rural reconstruction program that would combine education, agriculture, public health, and self-government. In 1926, his family moved to Dingxian (now called Dingzhou), a county in Hebei Province south of Beijing. Yan began recruiting American-trained Chinese graduates in agriculture from Cornell or Ohio State University and convinced educators from Columbia University and a Harvard-trained political scientist to live in Dingxian despite offering small salaries.

When Yan and his colleagues first told the peasants in Dingxian that they had come to teach them how to read, the peasants laughed at them and said it was impossible.

But when the first class of peasants graduated, village heads asked for schools in their towns. By 1931, all 453 villages in Dingxian had their own schools, with 20,000 students taught by volunteer teachers.

Though Yan received many invitations to start literacy programs or county-wide experiments in other parts of China, he purposefully limited the program to Dingxian. He wanted to prove, by definite results, that they could advance the farmers’ education, health, agricultural output, and political participation there.

Life in Dingxian, however, soon went through a time of upheaval. The county was lost and regained seven times after Japan invaded northern China in 1937.

In 1940, MEM opened the National College of Rural Reconstruction near Chongqing, Nationalist China’s wartime capital. But relocating farther south did not solve the organization’s problems. Japan frequently bombed the city. Donors stopped offering grants. In the midst of this, 20 MEM families died when the boat carrying them—along with their personal items, MEM records, and equipment—capsized.

After the Pacific War ended in 1945, the Chinese Civil War escalated. Because of Yan’s success at rural work and his loose connection with the Nationalist Party, the Chinese Communist Party considered him a threat.

In December 1949, Yan and several family members moved to New York City. One year later, China’s Communist government dissolved the MEM office near Chongqing, two months after China entered the Korean War and the United States became an enemy country.

During this period, Yan was confronted with personal and political difficulties. His son, Fred, had remained in China and died during one of the anti-Western campaigns that followed the Korean War. The Chinese Communists accused Yan of being a slave to American imperialism and a conspirator with Chiang Kai-Shek, the Nationalist leader who had moved to Taiwan.

But Yan’s dedication to multifaceted rural reconstruction never faltered.

In the summer of 1952, he returned to Asia to establish the Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement (PRRM), building its headquarters in Silang, Cavite, about 25 miles south of Manila. He chose the Southeast Asian country because he felt that it had a Christian heritage and abundant resources and that its president, Ramon Magsaysay, was close to the people.

PRRM improved rural health by cleaning up the villages, setting up garbage sites, and providing basic medical attention. They set up showcase farms that grew dual harvests and promoted rural credit cooperatives. They educated the rural people and trained the youth to become local leaders.

In 1960, Yan founded the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction (IIRR), which was headquartered in New York but operationally based in the Philippines. He spent the next 30 years encouraging rural reconstruction in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central America.

When he stepped down as chair of IIRR in 1988, Yan left the Philippines and settled in New York City, where he died in Manhattan at the age of 97. He is buried next to Alice, who died in the Philippines in 1980.

While Yan never lived in China again, he was able to visit the country in 1985 and 1987 during a period of greater openness to the West. In Dingxian, he found out that his home had been converted into a museum, with an exhibition of his work in China and around the world.

In the 1990s, the Central Educational Science Institute in Beijing established the James Yen Association. More than ten volumes on Yan’s thoughts and approaches to rural reconstruction and development were published in China.

How did Yan press on despite facing so many obstacles?

“To build his health, he kept a regular schedule and retired before 11 every night,” wrote Wei Chengtung in an essay for the book Y. C. James Yen’s Thought on Mass Education and Rural Reconstruction: China and Beyond. “To build his spirit, he prayed every morning and took time to think, to plan, and [to] do systematic research.”

He also enjoyed singing hymns that focused on the cross and found guidance from reading devotional literature, such as the writings of St. Catherine of Siena.

Yan’s love for Jesus and for the poor attracted others to join him in the vision that he felt God had given him. American missionary Gardner Tewksbury pointed to this attribute of Yan in a 1968 tribute titled “My Friend Jimmy Yen: A Glimpse into the Personal Life of One of the World’s Most Remarkable Christians.”

“The call is for those with the Christ spirit, who like the Good Shepherd know and love their sheep and stand ready to lay down their lives for them,” he wrote.

Alice also pointed to Yan’s faith as the motivation behind his work, according to Tewksbury’s tribute: “The driving force which has brought this movement through such difficulties and heavy odds stems from Jim’s deep conviction from the start that this work is not his, but God’s.”

Stacey Bieler is the author of “Patriots” or “Traitors”? A History of American-Educated Chinese Students and coeditor of three volumes of Salt and Light.

This excerpt was adapted from Salt and Light, Volume 1: Lives of Faith that Shaped Modern China, edited by Carol Lee Hamrin and Stacey Bieler. Copyright © 2009 Wipf and Stock Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Books

Review

Modern ‘Technoculture’ Makes the World Feel Unnaturally Godless

Blake Adams

By changing our experience of reality, it tempts those who don’t perceive God to conclude that he doesn’t exist.

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

In his 1996 novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies, John Updike has a fictional Reformed Presbyterian minister feel his faith abandon him like an exhale, leaving his “habitual mental contortions decisively relaxed.” For this minister, the experience was one of relief, “an immense strain of justification” lifted “at a blow.” Unbelief, in this sense, is not so much a choice of the will but the relaxation of the will, with the mind clicking into an atheist-materialist position that feels reassuringly natural.

Many Christians today feel the “immense strain of justification” when measuring our theological beliefs against our everyday experience. We might be convinced God exists, but this mental stance conflicts with our surface experience of the world as a secular place where God’s existence is not obvious. It’s not obvious, at least, in the same way the coffee in your hand and the national election are obvious. Instead, belief demands mental exertion.

How come we often find atheism plausible—as an account that strikes us as somehow aligned to reality at a basic, intuitive level—even if we think it is incorrect? In Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age, Joseph Minich equips believers to grapple intelligently with the godless feel of the world around them.

Interpreting divine absence

In the book, Minich aims to bolster “persons motivated to maintain orthodox religious faith in our current context” by helping them “recognize the unique role that their will must take in the maintenance of their religion.” As he argues, this work of maintenance requires inhabiting our secular age theologically.

Minich makes his case in a refreshing way. In recent years, there has been a steady stream of books on secularism, modernity, and disenchantment, but the bulk of these adopt a “history of ideas” approach, attributing these developments to Marxism or feminism or Hegelianism or Puritanism or late-stage capitalism, to name a few. Minich counters that these accounts, while relatively valuable, don’t tell the whole story. Ideas are not the only driving force of history.

As Minich argues, the root cause of our divine-absence discourse is phenomenological rather than ideological. In other words, it derives more from how we perceive the world than our theories about it. Supplementing the work of Charles Taylor, author of the oft-cited study A Secular Age, Minich agrees that our tacit experience of modern life has altered our view of reality.

The triumph of the Industrial Revolution played a pivotal role in this shift, ensuring that machines and modern technology would fundamentally shape our perception of reality. Over time, the Industrial Revolution gave rise to what Minich calls the “bulwarks of unbelief”: the background features of modern “technoculture” that (both consciously and subconsciously) render belief in God implausible (though not impossible) and atheism plausible (though not inevitable).

Minich’s entry point into this problem is how modern people interpret divine absence. As a phenomenon, this is nothing new. Ancient and medieval peoples experienced it (just read the Psalms, particularly Psalm 88), but they interpreted it differently. God’s perceived absence could mean, perhaps, that he stood in judgment over a person or people for their sin. Or it could mean that, like a trainer, he was leaving us to be tested. At any rate, God’s absence called for interpretation.

Something happened in the hundred years spanning 1860 and 1960, Minich argues. In that period, the possible meanings of God’s absence shrunk down to one: God’s nonexistence.

In this regard, the ancients had the more logical approach. Minich asks, Why do modern people immediately and intuitively interpret God’s absence to mean he does not exist, when so many other explanations are available? Put another way, why is our first impulse to equate invisibility with unreality?

Part of the answer, Minich argues provocatively, is that our experience of what reality is has changed. As he sees it, modern technoculture mediates—and even distorts—our tacit sense of what is real. In consequence, God’s existence begins to seem (but only seem) less plausible than it really is.

Since the Industrial Revolution, our engagement with the world has been increasingly filtered through technology. What is more, as our tools have grown in refinement, we rely on them not only to engage the world but also to exert a level of control over the world.

In Minich’s observation, technoculture makes the world “entirely subject to” our own “agency or ends” (emphasis added). In turn, this dynamic informs our sense of what is real and cultivates a default posture toward the world:

To put it bluntly, the [technocultural] world is a world for me. I do not find myself in a big, mysterious world suffused with agencies to which I am subject and around which I must learn to co-navigate with my immediate community. I find myself in a world almost entirely tool-i-fied, a world of my own (agentless!) subjectivity before an increasingly silent cosmos.

In technoculture, then, the idea of a supreme agent, God, fails to comport with our everyday experience. It does not even seem relevant. “In my judgment,” writes Minich, “the modern technological order tacitly communicates to us, day in and day out, that reality (the sort that actually concerns us), belongs to the order of the manipulable.”

Within this order, we can govern our lives with rational, efficient control, as when we adjust the thermostat, block a Facebook profile, or select a movie from the heap of options. But everything outside this “manipulable” realm hardly registers as “real” to modern sensibilities. No wonder that minds formed in such an environment will naturally equate divine absence with divine nonexistence.

Comings and goings

I have attempted to outline Minich’s argument, but this task is difficult. His book progresses in centrifugal rather than linear fashion, building like an upward spiral in a series of excursions. Here, we read about Karl Marx’s theory of labor. There, about the signification of the city in ancient cosmogony. Now, we consider Jacques Ellul’s concept of technique, and now, Martin Luther’s anthropology of hearing.

Shifts in style exacerbate the mental whiplash. On one topic, Minich waxes lofty and lyrical. On the next, his prose turns mind-numbingly technical. The central idea of the book, that modern technoculture obscures (and even distorts) our experience of reality, is reinforced with each spin of the narrative wheel, but the number and interdisciplinary variety of his arguments can be dizzying.

This makes it difficult to hold Minich’s work together or consider it in comprehensive ways. The saving grace is his appeal to the reader’s lived experience in technoculture. Some of his observations will resonate while others will fall flat, but you may find yourself nodding in recognition more often than not.

Minich clarifies that he has not refuted atheism in some unanswerable way. At most, he has deflated it by showing how nonrational pressures make “atheist claims plausible” to modern minds.

But simply by raising the point that divine absence requires interpretation, Minich has accomplished something powerful. Beyond recommending some mental exercises to help us reattune ourselves to a reality that bolsters faith, Minich advances a particular theology of divine absence, which develops over the course of the book.

He reminds us that God often makes himself scarce. History is full of divine comings and goings: smoking mountains one day, then centuries without so much as a prophet. Even before the Fall, God’s presence was not constant; he appears to have walked with Adam in the cool of the day and then withdrawn. We relate to God through his absence, it seems, as much as through his presence.

In what would strike some readers as a twist, Minich reveals that he likes technology. The solution to the current crisis of divine absence, he thinks, is not reversing the clock and returning to a time when our engagement with nature and creation was more direct. Instead, he pushes us to inhabit our current moment theologically.

This involves a recognition, he writes, that “we are contingent creatures who develop. We mature. And we mature and change and are perfected by means of shifting circumstances and the trials that they bring.” Minich favors the analogy of child-rearing. For children to mature, parents must allow moments of controlled abandonment, permitting them to explore their world freely or be left alone with tasks. Understanding divine absence as one of God’s “parenting methods” helps us interpret this age of divine absence as a possible aid to spiritual maturity.

While I appreciate what Minich is getting at, the child-rearing analogy presents problems, as it could be taken to insinuate that Christian sanctification succeeds by maturing us beyond our need for God. Minich anticipates this reading and warns against it, but he must work against his own imagery.

Perhaps a more congenial image comes from the Song of Solomon, especially as we follow the ancient Christian habit of presenting it as a romantic allegory of the church’s union with Christ, its bridegroom. In this poem, the bride searches the garden for an absent lover. She catches a glimpse of him through the lattice. He again vanishes, which only inflames her longing.

Here, Scripture depicts the lover of our souls as both absent and present. As he deliberately, even playfully, eludes us, he induces an agony of love. By his absence, he teaches us how to long, and so to receive his presence (when we have it) as a gift, not a given.

In this way, trust in God sustains us in his absence, assuring us that the withdrawal of presence need not represent a withdrawal of love. God is absent, but as we say in the Nicene Creed, “He will come again.”

Blake Adams is a writer, editor, and trained historian.

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Church Life

Latino Churches’ Vibrant Testimony

Nicole Massie Martin

Hispanic American congregations tend to be young, vibrant, and intergenerational. The wider church has much to learn with and from them.

Israel Torres / Pexels / Edits by CT

The common language of worship has a way of capturing the heart even when the mind cannot understand. I remembered this as I wiped my tears while Spanish-speaking Christians sang passionately around me at The Sent Summit conference in Orlando last month.

Though my tourist-level Spanish could not bear the weight of references to the divine, I knew the meaning of the song in my soul. Voices rang to the glory of God. Words I couldn’t translate expressed the depth of our depravity encompassed by his unconditional love.

While we shared neither language nor ethnicity, my experience in worship with Latino pastors and leaders in America reminded me: This community, like every culture, is important to the kingdom of God. And the wider church has much to learn with and from these siblings in Christ about faith, community, and resilience.

First, while many American churches are suffering from an inability to reach younger generations, Latino churches are swimming against that tide. Aaron Earls of Lifeway Research has described Hispanic congregations as “newer, younger, and more effectively evangelistic than the average US Protestant church,” and he notes that “a majority conduct their services only in Spanish (53%), while 22 percent are bilingual.”

Young people in immigrant families in America often serve as teachers for their parents in a variety of ways, ranging from learning English to navigating the complexities of unfamiliar health care and educational systems. This dynamic makes younger people integral to the life of the church too. Latino congregations tend to be willing to embrace them not as passive recipients of the faith but as active participants in shaping it. Young Christians are called upon early to help lead worship, teach, and serve as translators.

This reverse intergenerational ministry, where young people tend to bring their families into the fold, demonstrates both the dynamism and complexity of faith that transcends age barriers. Having to navigate so many roles at young ages can uniquely equip Christians for ministry—but it’s also taxing and can be traumatic, marked by poverty, loss, and injustice.

“Gen Z doesn’t need to be reached; they need to be rescued,” one younger Latino leader told me during a gathering at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena in August. “It’s going to be messy.” This messy, beautiful process of integrating multiple generations is exactly what Latino Christian communities are willing to do.

Pastors Josh and Noemi Chavez talked to me about what this looks like in their intergenerational ministry in Long Beach, California. “When I started pastoring, I was in my 20s. Thinking about young people was easy. I had to intentionally consider the older generation,” Noemi reflected. “Now, in my 40s, I have to intentionally think about the younger and the older. If the Great Commission is at the center of the vision and mission of the church, then as leaders we can lovingly shepherd the hearts of each generation and find joy in the expression of the gospel message.”

When successful, that witness creates a rich tapestry of faith that honors tradition while embracing newness and innovation. And many Spanish-speaking congregations are a cultural tapestry, too, serving as a gathering place for people from multiple countries with real differences in thought, expression, and, notably, political views.

Contrary to popular US misconceptions, the Latino evangelical community is not a monolithic voting bloc. Hispanic voters in America hold a wide spectrum of political ideologies, including on immigration. Yet while many predominantly white churches are politically homogenous, Latino clergy told me they see a diversity of political views in their congregations.

This ability to maintain unity in worship is particularly striking and countercultural in today’s polarized climate, a valuable model of prioritizing faith and community over political disagreements. These Hispanic congregations are proof that it’s possible to debate politics and keep breaking bread together.

“The sent church is a diverse church,” Gabriel Salguero shared. “It is a reflection of the Kingdom of God.” With his wife, Jeannette, Salguero is the founder of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition and The Gathering Place Church in Orlando. For decades, they have shepherded pastors and church members from nearly every continent and walk of life, and he sees ideological differences as a strength, not merely an obstacle to overcome.

“The church needs this diversity, even diversity of thought,” Salguero remarked at the summit in Orlando. “If we’re all thinking exactly the same, we’re not all thinking.”

With a tapestry of generations and a range of varying views, what could possibly hold these communities together in Christ? The short answer is the Holy Spirit—and coffee.

While the service provides inspiration, the coffee afterward provides communion. After-service conversations over a cafecito, a café con leche, or pan dulce provide crucial opportunities for relationship-building and community formation. This is the space where those new to the congregation can become known, the young can connect, the elders can reminisce, and the pastors can provide holistic care.

This commitment to being present with people in their everyday lives reflects a deep understanding of the familia cultural value, leading to profound care for others.

That model of care is ever more important as the broader church grapples with challenges of declining attendance, generational gaps, and cultural relevance. The Latino church in America reminds us that the gospel is not just a message to be preached but a life to be lived—in community, across generations, embracing diversity, overcoming challenges, and always open to the new things God is doing.

“Hispanic churches continue to be a driving force in the revitalization of faith in the US,” Enid Almanzar, chair of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, told me after the summit. No church or ethnicity is perfect, of course. No community is free from the scars of striving to be more like Christ.

Yet in these complex times, the Latino church provides a beacon of hope to believers in America and beyond as we seek to be the church that our world so desperately needs. Like Paul, writing to the Corinthians about the churches in Macedonia, I “want you to know about the grace that God has given” these fellow believers (2 Cor. 8:1) so you can benefit from their example of faith.

Nicole Massie Martin is the chief impact officer at Christianity Today.

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Books

Review

Safety Shouldn’t Come First

Bonnie Kristian

A theologian questions our habit of elevating this goal above all others.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

You may be tempted to read The Pursuit of Safety: A Theology of Danger, Risk, and Security with an eye toward determining whether and to what extent its author, Wheaton College theologian Jeremy Lundgren, agrees with your own risk assessments and safety measures.

Don’t.

Though Lundgren leaves some hints about where he lands on discrete safety questions—most controversially, COVID-era rules and parenting decisions—his interest here is the bigger picture. Pursuit is an expansive examination of how Western culture prioritizes safety above other values and barely questions certain methods of ensuring it.

Lundgren rightly draws our attention to assumptions about safety so familiar we often fail to notice them, let alone consider their moral implications. He issues a timely call to churches to develop theologies of safety before they’re needed. And he effectively indicts modern bureaucrats who fiddle with past safety accomplishments but don’t consider the consequences.

But Pursuit also leaves key matters insufficiently addressed. One, about our culpability for unintentional harms, gets only a brief mention even though it could have far-reaching implications for day-to-day life. Another, about violence and other deliberate human harms, is part of a strange silence throughout the text. Lundgren attends primarily to safety from accidents.

Noticing the scenery

“The world we inhabit is scattered with tokens of safety,” Lundgren observes early in the book, “the warnings, notices, slogans, and labels that have been so thoroughly incorporated into the modern landscape.” Safety is literally part of the scenery, and that makes it easy to miss how its pursuit shapes our lives and informs our moral judgments.

Of course, it is good to be safe. Lundgren affirms that repeatedly. But he also observes that safety is not the only—or, for the Christian, the paramount—good that exists in the world. His aim is not to steer readers away from safety but to warn against pursuing it uncritically and at the expense of other goods we ought to value more.

That’s a tall order in the 21st century. For decades now, safety has had “an elevated moral status” in Western culture, Lundgren argues:

In an era typified by the lack of a cohesive moral framework, safety is something of an unquestioned, and therefore unifying, virtue. Its unifying power can be seen in the pervasiveness and homogeneity of the tokens of safety across all spheres of life. Safety has an authoritative ethical place in our world, influencing how we make decisions, interact with creation, respond to hardship, and relate with each other. Declaring something unsafe is generally equivalent to declaring it wrong.

That wasn’t always the case. The human need for safety is a historical constant, but our society’s practices for pursuing it are novel. I can’t recount the linguistic, mathematical, religious, and technological history Lundgren relays, but it’s useful equipment for understanding how we think about safety today, how we thought differently in the past, and how our attitudes might change going forward.

This portion of Pursuit includes important exhortations to prudence in a procedure-dependent age. Don’t simply follow the rules of safety, Lundgren urges. Develop wise and humane judgment and shoulder the responsibility that comes with it. There’s also an admirable rejection of chronological snobbery here, as well as a sharp critique of how our safety apparatuses continue to grow even after major risks have been ameliorated and all that remains is relatively minor fine-tuning.

Alongside that broader discussion, Lundgren reliably returns to theological questions: whether, how, and why the church’s pursuit of safety should differ from the world’s. Safety, again, is a good thing—but it is not better than Christ, nor is it a good we can perfectly acquire and maintain before the full redemption of a fallen creation. “The resolution of humanity’s battle with danger,” Lundgren writes, “will not take place within the horizons of history.”

While that battle continues, though, he calls Christians to build a theology of safety before danger strikes. The contemporary Western church was caught flat-footed when COVID-19 and its containment policies appeared, Lundgren says, because we never had to think much about safety in the past. (How little of humanity can say the same!)

Lundgren never spells out his preferred pandemic policies, but even if you think he’s hinting in the wrong direction, his push for a more deliberate theology of safety is needful. Having one wouldn’t have guaranteed the same pandemic decisions from every local congregation. But I do think it could have encouraged choices grounded more in Christ-centered prudence, care, and courage than in partisanship or instinct.

COVID and culpability

On the subject of COVID, there’s a portion of The Pursuit of Safety concerned with unintentional sins. It’s part of a larger discussion of accidents—more on that in a moment—but here Lundgren’s focus narrows to the moral status of accidents that cause harm. The discussion is heavily informed by how the Mosaic Law deals with acts like unintentional killings, and much of Lundgren’s interest here is in forgiveness.

“All lawlessness is sin,” he writes, “whether intentional or unintentional. Accidents—such as dropping a rock, using a malfunctioning ax, or forgetting a boiling pot of water—may not, in themselves, be sins if they cause no harm. But they are frequently the result of other sins such as impatience, pride, or worry, and they may become sins if they lead to harm.”

Few would quibble, I expect, with the idea that a person who accidentally starts a fire by forgetting a boiling pot is responsible for that fire and must make amends. But if that accident isn’t the result of another sin (and it’s easy to imagine scenarios in which the forgetfulness is not sin-related), does responsible necessarily mean culpable? Is that forgetfulness necessarily sinful?

The question becomes even more pressing when Lundgren turns to the transmission of infectious diseases, like COVID-19 and the flu:

Sometimes a person’s actions set in motion a sequence of events that result in harm to others, but the person never knows. When the Covid virus first began to spread, efforts were made, with minimal success, to trace the web of its transmission. The actions of many, knowingly or unknowingly, intentionally or unintentionally, were part of that web with its sometimes harmful and occasionally fatal consequences. While a spotlight was put on the spread of this particular virus, human interactions and movements contribute to the spread of viruses constantly. The common flu is transmitted through seemingly innocuous movements and gestures, yet it is the cause of death for tens of thousands of people in America every year.

That is a complete paragraph, and it comes at the end of the section in which Lundgren says that “all lawlessness is sin” and unintentional killings are “transgressions, violations of the law and ‘an intrinsic offense’ against God.” While the next section doesn’t address infectious disease transmission, it reaffirms that “accidental harm is sin.” Yet it tempers that judgment by saying God “has not burdened us with a system of morality based on fate or chance in which people are responsible either for their part in an endless chain of unchangeable events or for the random and unknowable results of their actions.”

So does Lundgren think we sin when we unwittingly spread a flu bug? Are we culpable for that kind of accidental harm? I think that’s his implication. But if a virus mistaken for an allergy or a presymptomatic bus ride are sins, then surely Lundgren’s discussion of forgiveness and amends for known harms is not enough. You could reach “ZeroCovid” extremes with a view of sin like that.

Safety and security

The subtitle of Pursuit mentions “security,” and early on Lundgren briefly distinguishes between security and safety, linking security to intentional harm (“murder, war, abuse, theft, and sabotage”) and safety to unintentional harm (“accidents, crashes, injuries, and mishaps, occasions when harm comes about through carelessness, chaos, or unanticipated events”). But then he concedes that the two words are “synonyms, with a high degree of overlap in meaning and usage,” and he never places security and intentional harm outside the book’s scope.

Yet as The Pursuit of Safety proceeds, it overwhelmingly considers unintentional harm. Lundgren does mention school shootings and dangerous missionary work, but not at length. He doesn’t dwell on the modern state of security, even though its trappings—and especially visible post-9/11 changes like airport security and mass surveillance—will have shaped many readers’ thinking on safety. And though he gives attention to natural and spiritual evil, deliberate human evil is strangely neglected in favor of workplace and traffic accidents.

Some of that imbalance surely owes to the history Lundgren reviews. Much of it concerns the wildly unsafe workplaces of the early Industrial Revolution and the pro-safety activism and bureaucracy that emerged to tame them. But a century after the Progressive Era, the danger of workplace accidents doesn’t loom quite so largely for most of us.

Indeed, insofar as we manage any scrutiny of safety culture and its tradeoffs, we tend to apply the lens of intentional harms, not accidents. The pandemic is a recent exception to that pattern, but typically we have debates about things like the value of childhood freedom versus the risk of kidnapping, the value of civil liberties versus the risk of terrorism, or the value of digital free speech versus the risk of disinformation and verbal abuse.

Beyond that mismatch, Lundgren’s attention to accidents also allows him to avoid directly addressing whether Christians can ever resort to violence in our pursuit of safety. Much of his language—not to mention the extensive citations of Dietrich Bonhoeffer—suggests Lundgren is commending some variant of Christian nonviolence.

“It is possible to anticipate and avoid certain types of danger,” he writes, “but to do so in an immoral way that exposes you to other types of dangers, a way that is not rightly formed by love of neighbor or love of God, but is based on anticipations that are not rightly formed by Scripture’s prophetic testimony regarding the future.” Lundgren warns against allowing the pursuit of safety to become “idolatrous, the strivings of the nations,” and emphasizes “the priority of keeping one’s way pure over keeping it safe.”

Life’s risks, he advises, should not stop us “from doing what is good and right.” He reminds readers that “Christ’s disciples are called to give up physical well-being, even to the point of death, for his sake. When the call of Christ conflicts with the pursuit of safety, the call of Christ prevails.” And, crucially, Lundgren describes enemy love as “quite reasonable to those whose lives are held secure by the love of God.”

None of this necessitates a Christian pacifist reading. But that’s a plausible interpretation, and the status of violence for Christians is an important element of any theology of safety. Is eschewing violence how we keep our way pure? Is nonviolence essential to following the example and call of Christ? At the end of Pursuit, I don’t know what Lundgren would say, but less on accidents and more on violence would have been clarifying.

Even with that imbalance, however, The Pursuit of Safety is a bracing and informative call to resilience and critical thinking, to trust in God and hope in the Resurrection, to notice unintended consequences, and to get on with a life of following Jesus instead of endlessly making sure.

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

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Culture

What Would Lecrae Do?

Christina Gonzalez Ho

Why Kendrick Lamar’s question matters.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

For the first few minutes of Kendrick Lamar’s new song, I only half listened, nodding in time to the hypnotic beat while responding to emails on my laptop. Then came the line that made me sit up and stare bug-eyed at my husband, who was listening beside me on the couch.

“Did he say Lecrae?” We kept listening. A few minutes later, Kendrick said the name again. My mouth dropped open. When the song ended, we played it from the top, this time listening carefully.

The untitled track, released on Instagram on September 11, expresses the acclaimed rapper’s weariness and disgust with the contemporary hip-hop world and the music industry at large. In the song, Kendrick feels jaded by the machinations of the very system in which he has found exceptional success. He has received 17 Grammys, 29 BET Hip Hop Awards, and a 2018 Pulitzer Prize. His Drake diss track “Not Like Us” broke multiple streaming records, becoming so popular that, earlier this year at a sold-out Los Angeles arena, he performed the song to roaring applause five times in a row. Kendrick was recently announced as the headliner for the 2025 Super Bowl Halftime Show.

But instead of celebrating any of these successes, Kendrick spends all five minutes and six seconds of his new song venting his contempt for an industry full of people who “parade in gluttony” and “glorify scamming.” He describes a “culture bred with carnivores,” rife with liars, mercenaries, and cowards whose money emboldens them to make “nasty decisions.” His lyrics are equal parts searching and vengeful. In a repeated refrain, Kendrick pleads for God to give him life, peace, and forgiveness—to “draw the line” between himself and the peers whose wickedness he despises.

Elsewhere, his words turn violent, calling for the “village” to burn down, for heads to crack, for “agony, assault, and battery.” “I think it’s time to watch the party die,” Kendrick repeats again and again. Things are so irredeemably corrupt that he suggests the only solution is destruction, Great Flood style.

The rapper doesn’t waver from his verdict until the final verse, where he asks the question that made me sit up and stare: “Sometimes I wonder what Lecrae would do.”

Lecrae, of course, is the Christian rapper Lecrae Devaughn Moore, whose career began in the early 2000s and whose frequent collaborators have included Andy Mineo, Trip Lee, Sho Baraka, and Jackie Hill Perry. Most of Lecrae’s early work is explicitly theological, with songs like “Don’t Waste Your Life” (“We’re created for him / Outta the dust he made us for him / Elects us and he saves us for him”) and “Tell the World” (“You hung there bleedin’/ And ya’ died for my lies and my cheatin’ / My lust and my greed, and / What is a man that you mindful of him?”) garnering him widespread acclaim in the evangelical world and ins with the likes of John Piper, Tim Keller, Tony Evans, and Judah Smith.

Later, with albums like Gravity (2012) and Anomaly (2014), Lecrae moved away from overtly theological lyrics, instead weaving his faith into songs about identity, relationships, race, and class. In more recent years, he’s written extensively about experiences with corruption, hypocrisy, and racism within the church that resulted in a severe crisis of both faith and mental health.

Still, the core of Lecrae’s music remains his relationship with God and the church. Although a highly successful artist in his own right—with BET Awards, Grammys, and several No. 1 Billboard hits—his audience has always been, perhaps always will be, much smaller than someone like Kendrick Lamar’s.

And yet—his influence matters. Lecrae and Kendrick struck up a friendship early in their careers after the latter released his theodicy-themed track, “Faith.” Kendrick has long been vocal about his relationship with Jesus, and though some have questioned his orthodoxy, his faith remains a central theme in his music.

“Sometimes I wonder what Lecrae would do / F— these n— up or show ’em just what prayer do?” Kendrick wonders. Faced with the same seemingly irredeemable industry, would Lecrae pursue some form of vigilante justice—visceral, instant, immediately satisfying—or the slow, patient route of prayer? Moments later, after a fresh round of denunciations, Kendrick repeats the question: “I mean—[I] wonder what Lecrae would do.”

Perhaps Kendrick has read Lecrae’s memoir, released in 2020, detailing the rapper’s struggles with childhood trauma, depression, and a crisis of faith after the evangelical church’s cold response to a string of police killings of unarmed Black men.

Or perhaps he’s listened to Lecrae’s 2022 track “Deconstruction,” in which the rapper describes hitting rock bottom until a midnight encounter with God broke through the fog of despair.

In both works, Lecrae details a process of healing marked by weakness and surrender, a slow, steady journey entirely dependent on the love of God and others. It’s a stark departure from the brute force and willpower Kendrick finds so attractive. And it’s clear that both Lecrae’s art and his life have been compelling enough to make Kendrick take notice.

As a writer whose work revolves around my Christian faith, I often find myself discouraged, imagining I am destined to obscurity. When peers publish bestsellers or have their books adapted into movies, I find myself wishing my work was more like theirs, addressing Zeitgeisty themes like race, sexuality, or climate anxiety from a primarily agnostic worldview.

Instead, I find myself compulsively writing about spirituality—specifically, the conundrum of being a rational person whose life trajectory has been shaped by supernatural experiences. Sometimes I even feel resentful at my religion, as though it’s a restriction on my art, relegating me to a lifetime of limited reach at best, and irrelevance at worst.

So to hear one of the most talented and decorated rappers alive name-check an artist whose work has revolved around Jesus was deeply heartening. What moves me is not the idea that someday my own work might be noticed by someone more famous. It’s the thought that a sincere, intelligent, and profound artist like Kendrick Lamar, someone who’s seen no end of good ideas and interesting art, might find something in straightforwardly Christian music that gives him pause, that makes him reconsider.

Art that gains this sort of traction must do more than present accurate theological facts or insist on the supremacy of a “Christian worldview.” It must be prophetic.

Prophetic art is art that reveals truths heretofore unrecognized, unseen, or inaccessible. To be recognized as prophetic is one of the highest forms of praise an artist can receive. It’s a word that’s been used to describe Kendrick Lamar, who cunningly folded a lament about toxic drinking culture into his “club-banger” track “Swimming Pools” and spares no one in his excoriating analysis of anti-Blackness in “The Blacker the Berry” (“You hate me, don’t you? / I know you hate me just as much as you hate yourself” and “So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street / When gang-banging make me kill a n— blacker than me? / Hypocrite!”)

I would argue that “prophetic” is a fitting description for Lecrae’s work as well. Throughout his career, Lecrae has used his music not only to preach the gospel but also to engage his audience with uncomfortable truths about everything from religious hypocrisy (“Bookstore pimpin’ them hope books / Like God don’t know how broke looks / And telling me that I’m gon’ reap a mil’ / If I sow into these low crooks”) to the entrenched racial biases that mar white America’s practice of Christianity (“Right before the fall of 2015, I was all off / It involved killing Michael Brown, had me feeling down / Tweeted ’bout it, Christians call me clown … spoke about my pain, I was met with blame / ‘Shame on you, ’Crae, stop crying, get back to Jesus’ name’”).

Prophetic work is more than just eloquent or insightful, and it doesn’t always find commercial success. It is born of an abiding connection to the Spirit of God—the type of connection that empowers us to create honestly and courageously, even at risk to our comfort and reputation. To make prophetic work is decidedly not to change ourselves to fit the Zeitgeist but to maintain fidelity to the unique questions, ideas, perspectives, and modes of expression God has placed within us—and to make our work unto the Lord, the source of all wisdom and prophecy.

Only then can we contribute something to culture that doesn’t already exist—something capable of causing the Kendrick Lamars of our own disciplines to wonder what we would do.

Christina Gonzalez Ho is the author of the audio series The Last Two Years and the cofounder of Estuaries.

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Ideas

No More Sundays on the Couch

Erica Bryand Ramirez

COVID got us used to staying home. But it’s the work of God’s people to lift up the name of Christ and receive God’s Word—together.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

It is Sunday morning and quiet throughout our house. The first morning light is slipping through our blinds, just enough for my husband to read his Bible and for me to write. The only thing I hear is our coffee percolating. Sunday mornings are easily the most peaceful time in our otherwise noisy, demanding schedule.

During the pandemic with churches closed, we learned to savor Sunday mornings as especially convivial and serene. After a couple quiet reading hours, my husband, Chris, would prepare breakfast. Our three children would tumble out of bed around 11 to pancakes or waffles, eggs, and bacon. Then Chris and I would head out for a walk around our neighborhood, waving at neighbors. On more ambitious weekends, we’d take to hiking trails.

When struck by convictions about missing church, Chris and I would wake the kids a bit earlier, around 10:30. Though they were only really losing 30 minutes’ sleep, they’d make a grumpy little show of it. We’d file into the living room, sit on our green couches, and take in some spirited preaching by a local megachurch pastor. Megachurches had an advantage during the pandemic, easily pivoting to sleek broadcasts while many smaller churches struggled to improvise.

After the pandemic faded away, though, we found our new routine difficult to break. Attending church in person now feels like a series of sacrifices. We have to wake the children at 9:30 to get them fed, dressed, and out the door on time. All this bustle means Chris and I get less peace, less quiet, less reading, and no leisurely morning walk. It’s 8:09 a.m. now, as I write this. To get to church this morning, I’ll have to stop writing in 30 minutes.

Reader, I don’t want to. I do not want to make these little sacrifices. Sunday mornings are restorative when they are quiet and leisurely. They are good for all of us.

Or so I once thought, but no longer.

The pandemic had far-reaching consequences in our society, especially for young people—including my children. My smallest had her kindergarten year disrupted so that when she finally returned to school in person, she struggled to make friends. My middle child’s online elementary school didn’t prepare her for the very different demands of middle school. And my high schooler spent too much time online, imbibing geopolitics and national news in ways that left him stressed and cynical.

Sundays at home did renew our individual energy and family life. But they also exacerbated our sense of disconnection from community life. Staying in meant we got more and more of our information from screens—which in turn presented the world as increasingly fractious.

By staying home as a family on Sundays, I realized, I was subtly and unintentionally telling my children that the world was too tiresome and too fraught to engage on the weekends. I was modeling the idea that we could retreat, even from life together with fellow Christians.

Our children took note. Initially, they complained that they saw less of our friends, but then they began to communicate a growing distress about public life. They told me their worries about school shootings, the prospect of a military draft, friends moving away, and disagreements within our extended family over politics. For a variety of reasons, each of my children grew more ambivalent about relationships in our family, church, and schools. Our withdrawal from church fed into other kinds of retreat. Looking back, this trajectory seems designed to produce a collective depression.

Upon reflection, the most spiritually formative time in my life bears some similarities to this one.

I was a couple of months shy of twelve years old when my littlest sister died from a heart condition. Shortly after she passed away, my dad built our family a new house. Moving into this house meant that I had to leave my school and church, which were too far from our new neighborhood. When I began seventh grade just a few months later, I was overwhelmed by grief and had no cousins, no church community, and no school friends around to help. I’d never been so profoundly alone before this experience and have never been so since.

Mercifully, we joined Westover Hills, a vibrant, 400-person congregation that embraced our family at the lowest point of our lives. Though our grief felt isolating, we still attended services every Sunday morning and night, and every Wednesday too. Soon, our family life was structured by our church participation. My dad joined the orchestra, my mom, the choir. I joined the youth group and my younger sister, children’s church.

When I look back now, I see my family was hobbling along, doing the best we could under the circumstances. But I also see choir members’ mauve robes with cranberry accents, their arms lifted and eyes closed in worship; deacons with broad shoulders and smiles; friends with cars, picking me up for a Friday youth game night. The people of Westover carried us through the most trying time of our lives with their faithfulness, their voluntary good cheer, their testimonies, and their prayers. They were not just our church but the church, helping us to keep our faith when our hearts were broken. I remain so grateful to them, and I always feel deep down that Westover Hills of the 1990s is the community I am truly from.

Westover came to mind when my husband recently announced that we really need to return to church, in person and for good. No more Sundays on the couch.

We committed to going to the same church we’d been watching online, at least for a while. We couldn’t risk losing momentum by going church shopping. We needed the structure, the regularity of church every Sunday in person. The megachurch would suffice.

This church is 22,000 strong, and in our service, there are about 5,000 people each week. This is a massive number of people. I feel like an ant when we walk in and even more so when we try to walk out, a process that brings the word “stampede” to mind. Two weeks ago, we waited 30 minutes to exit the parking lot.

There are so many little inconveniences in our Sunday mornings now, and they add up—to work. It is work to wrangle everyone, including myself, into the car, into the pew, and then back home again.

But we have a totally different experience of church in our actual pews. Our pastor preaches the same sermon in real time and online, so it isn’t the sermon that’s different. It’s the palpable participation of the congregation that makes the greatest difference.

In person, you can hear and see how the preaching lands with fellow believers. Three weeks ago, I heard a man say, “You better say that again”—emphatically, in a baritone staccato—when our pastor preached a salient point.

Another time, a person directly in front of me spent three minutes intermittently nodding her head in agreement during a section of preaching about surrender. She sat with her smallest girl right next to her, almost in her lap, and three boys right beside them. When our pastor landed a point, she nodded. He repeated or extended an idea, she nodded again. Later, the pastor asked, “How many people here have ever felt they are not worthy of a calling they feel God has placed on their lives?” Hands went up all around us.

A few weeks ago, more than 200 people were baptized. From our seats, we could see their bodies dipping into water on the main stage. We watched their faces in detail on the big screens, televised next to the words of the worship song we were all singing.Another person went down into the water; she came up smiling. She lifted her arms in triumph and the congregation swelled with cheers—a roar of celebration.

I would have seen none of this online: not the nodding, not the hands, not the vulnerability to say, I struggle with a sense of unworthiness. I might have seen the same person get baptized on my screen, but I wouldn’t have been there to raise my cheer with the congregation.

Now I realize, we make the event an event. The congregation, the laity, together, responds to ideas, to baptisms, to the need for prayer, and to the opportunity for praise. We model vulnerability and faithfulness for each other. Without our voices, our nodding heads, our cheers and encouragement, church does not happen. We don’t hear much about liturgy in a megachurch like this, but the word comes from a combination of Greek words for people and work. And it’s true, it takes work to get to church on Sunday and participate—but it is our work to do. Only we can do it.

Since recommitting to church in person, my children seem more sure of the world. They’re still aware of its troubles, but they have a visceral knowledge of what a life-giving community feels like and what it means to take heart, together, because Christ has overcome the world (John 16:33).

This is not knowledge I alone can give them. I can teach them, and a pastor can preach to them, but only a community of believers can cocreate the context in which our teaching and preaching make robust, embodied sense. Every time my children hear someone encourage the pastor, cheer on a fellow congregant, or lift their voices in earnest praise, they see that God has been faithful to real, live people. God grows more and more visible, more and more plausible, as they witness worship in real time.

As I look back on our season of withdrawal, I feel a new sense of responsibility. People go through trials, individually and as families. We reach breaking points. We sometimes weather grief and get stuck in sadness. It is the work of the laity to come together, to lift up the name of Christ, to receive God’s Word, to bear each other’s burdens (Gal. 6:2) and foster each other’s faith as they—we—heal and grow closer to God.

I want to do my part.

Erica Bryand Ramirez is a sociologist of religion who teaches Christian History at Baylor’s Truett Seminary. She lives in San Antonio with Chris and their three children.

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Theology

A Hurricane Doesn’t Tell Us Who to Hate

Russell Moore

Editor in Chief

What natural disasters reveal about God and neighbor.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

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

My family is from one of the most hurricane-prone places in the United States—our hometown was virtually wiped from the map by Hurricane Katrina. Because of this, we spend hurricane season tracking each tropical depression with dread and then, often, relief, when the storm moves somewhere out of the path of the people we love.

This time, though, with Hurricane Helene, we exhaled too soon. Instead of hitting the coast, the hurricane devastated inland places we never expected to be vulnerable—such as Asheville, North Carolina; Valdosta, Georgia; and countless other communities flooded nearly out of existence, with people stranded without food, electricity, or cell service.

After the storm passed through, I spent some time searching through social media, trying to determine the well-being of people I know and love. As I did, I saw—as we all have—image after image of human suffering and neighborhood devastation.

And, since it was social media, I also saw a lot of the usual types using the disaster to vindicate their own negative polarization. Some posted that the massive disaster befalling Asheville was due to that city’s well-known progressive culture and politics. Others countered by saying that most of the North Carolinians left homeless by the flood were in “red” counties, so maybe this was God’s judgment on MAGA. And on and on it went, as it always does.

In the past, after almost every hurricane, we could usually count the hours until Pat Robertson or some other television evangelist would blame it on God’s judgment on something—sometimes as specific as New Orleans’s annual “Southern Decadence” parade, and sometimes as general as “America’s turn away from God.”

Nor was this limited to the political right. While our families were crawling out of the rubble of Katrina, now almost 20 years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (then on the left and well before his gadfly persona of today) quoted the prophet Hosea to suggest that the storm was retribution for Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s opposition to the Kyoto Protocol for combating climate change: “For they that sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind.”

The trivialized venue of modern social media is unique, but the underlying sarcasm about “What did they do to deserve this?” is not. And the much more serious, much more sober fears and questions beneath that are not unique either. What does it tell us about God when human beings have their entire lives wiped away?

Kris Kristofferson, the singer/songwriter who died this week, wrote a song, “The Best of All Possible Worlds,” based off of unbelieving philosopher Voltaire’s book Candide. Kristofferson’s song references police brutality, systemic racism, and unjust treatment of the poor with a tongue-in-cheek praise to living “in this best of all possible worlds.” Kristofferson laughed, but Voltaire mocked, pointing his satire at Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s defense of God’s justice in a cosmos of suffering and evil, that this is “the best of all possible worlds.”

While I believe Voltaire was wrong, Kristofferson was right to point out the kind of fatalism the philosopher saw as coming along with many attempts to justify God. We can yield to a shrugging “that’s the way it is” mentality that sees in every evil a signpost as to what God actually wants. That can lead to a “eat, drink, and be merry” hedonism, with a passive acceptance of all sorts of things that should be, at least, mourned, and, at best, changed.

The way Voltaire points, though, leads to the same form of pessimistic resignation in the long run. If the universe around us is random, chaotic, and meaningless, then we ought to read in it what is most ultimate: suffering, pain, and death.

Christians, Jews, and other theists have wrestled with the so-called “problem of evil,” including the problem of “natural evil,” for millennia. Some give greater emphasis to God’s sovereignty, with good biblical backing. Others emphasize the freedom and responsibility of human beings, along with a rejection of the idea that God could ever be the author of sin—also with very good biblical backing.

The question abides: How could a good and powerful God allow a world such as this one to exist? Why could he not stop the dam from breaking to keep that North Carolinian family’s house from being washed away? Is it because God was angry at them?

This is not just about hurricanes and earthquakes and tsunamis. Often, even in the quieter, less visible manifestations of very personal suffering, someone will wonder—even if they don’t say it—What has that person done to deserve this?

The Bible doesn’t ignore this question. God does not tell Job why, ultimately, he was allowed to suffer—nor does he give Job an answer as to why the universe is so seemingly filled with chaos and danger. God does, however, reject the easy answers of Job’s counselors, some of whom seek to read backward from the suffering an oracle about what God wants.

Jesus, likewise, condemns the suggestion that those who suffer at the hand of other people’s evil intentions or in the throes of some natural calamity are to blame for their calamity (Luke 13:1–5). He repudiates the religious leaders’ suggestion that a man’s congenital blindness was his or his parents’ fault (John 9:3). The chaotic natural forces around Jesus—whether wild animals or unclean spirits or boat-threatening storms—were calmed and redirected by the presence and voice of Jesus, the one who puts heaven and nature back together again.

When Christians speak of the existence of natural evil as a mystery, some balk that this is a way of evading the question. And yet every attempt—from that of nihilists to hyper-Calvinists to everyone in between—to answer the meaning of suffering bumps upon a mystery of some sort. The question is, what kind of mystery?

The mystery we see in the way of Jesus is one in which we hold together a tension: that of a God for whom not a sparrow falls apart from his awareness (Matt. 10:29–31) and for whom the death of a friend is received with weeping by Jesus himself (John 11:35).

Without a sense of the mystery of the wildness and fallenness of this present universe, the danger is that we come to see it as “normal.” Even worse is the danger that we would see in the bloodiness and violence of nature some picture of the way that God is. As Reinhold Niebuhr warned in the last century, “Our obsession with the physical sciences and with the physical world has enthroned the brute and blind forces of nature, and we follow the God of the earthquake and the fire rather than the God of the still small voice.”

The fact that we view the world around us with simultaneous awe, wonder, terror, and grieving is itself a signpost that there’s something missing from the merely natural. Jesus told us that earthquakes and other natural disasters would happen. He did not picture these as good but as the “birth pains” (Matt. 24:7–8, ESV throughout) of an old order that will be passing away, yielding to a new order beyond imagination.

The Bible itself tells us that these birth pangs are a creation in upheaval, “groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now” (Rom. 8:22). Our response is not to solve that nature-in-crisis the way we would an algebra equation. Our response is to groan right along with it as we wait, with a hope we cannot see, for all things to be where they belong: under the feet of a resurrected Christ and his joint heirs.

In the meantime, we do exactly what numerous people are doing right now: Clearing away the trees in front of people’s homes. Sitting alongside grieving families who have lost the ones they love. Serving food to those whose pantries are empty and whose local grocery stores are under water.

A hurricane doesn’t tell us who to hate. It reminds us who to love.

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

News

‘It’s Okay to Say We’re Born Again’

Daniel Silliman in San José, Costa Rica

Global Methodists embrace evangelical identity but seek to emphasize distinctive doctrine of sanctification.

Global Methodists sang worship songs and Wesleyan hymns in Costa Rica at the first General Conference.

Courtesy of the Global Methodist Church

Nowhere on its website or in its founding documents does the new Global Methodist Church call itself evangelical.

Perhaps the term is too controversial, too divisive and political.

Or perhaps the Methodists are just out of practice.

“You know, as Methodists, it’s okay to say we’re born again,” said Asbury Theological Seminary professor Luther Oconer, preaching to the more than 900 people gathered in San José, Costa Rica, last week for the denomination’s first General Conference.

“Tell the person next to you, ‘I’m born again.’”

Around 900 people turned and said, “I’m born again,” laughing at themselves as they did.

The convening General Conference looked and sounded evangelical, with charismatic tinges. There was talk about evangelism, missions, the Great Commission, discipleship, and revival. People spoke unselfconsciously about the presence of the Holy Spirit, words from the Lord, what God is doing among them right now, and their love for Jesus. They read aloud from Scripture, taking the words as personal promises. Delegates raised their hands, singing Chris Tomlin’s “Holy Forever” and other contemporary worship songs, and lifted their voices with camp-meeting fervor when the band struck up “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.”

Oconer, who is originally from the Philippines and described himself as a third-generation Global South minister, ended his sermon with an altar call. He asked people to come forward to give themselves and their new denomination to Christ, committing to the biblical vision of a New Testament church.

“Let us be a church of Pentecost first,” he said. “We must be a church of Pentecost first. We are a people born of the Spirit, first and foremost.”

People streamed forward, kneeling, praying, crying, singing. Steve Beard, editor in chief of Good News, described this as “old-time Methodism,” a religious movement unconcerned with the propriety of mid-century mainline Protestantism, a movement of field preaching, circuit riders, conversion experiences, and testimonies about freedom from sin.

In the midst of resurgent evangelicalism, however, some Global Methodists are worried about preserving Wesleyan distinctives. They expressed concern that the denomination might slide into a kind of generic evangelicalism.

The religious landscape is increasingly dominated, after all, by nondenominational churches that reject the importance of distinctives. Even churches that have affiliations often downplay their differences. Many evangelical churches feel about the same, whether they’re Southern Baptist or Evangelical Free, Independent Christian or Christian and Missionary Alliance. They sing the same songs, talk about the same Christian celebrities, listen to similar sermons, and practice mostly indistinguishable liturgies.

Roughly half the congregations that left the United Methodist Church have not joined the Global Methodists. Some are waiting to see what happens. They have said they might join, depending on the shape the new denomination takes, its authority structure, and the guarantees put in place to prevent the repetition of their bad experiences. But others are just done with denominations—liberal or conservative, mainline or evangelical. Hanging on to Methodist connections isn’t that important to them.

Mark Tooley, president of The Institute on Religion and Democracy and a lifelong Methodist, said the new denomination is going “against the headwinds of current American religious preferences.” As they embrace an evangelical style, Global Methodists will be forced to answer the question, “Why should Christians be specifically Wesleyan?”

In Costa Rica—as delegates passed a constitution, established the process for nominating bishops, and dealt with the legislative business of founding a new denomination—they also worked informally to articulate a Wesleyan charism, the unique spiritual gift that the Global Methodists could offer to evangelicals and the whole church.

“I think what we have to offer as a movement is the ‘heart strangely warmed,’ which is hearts changed, sanctification,” said Emily Allen, an Asbury seminary student and a delegate to the General Conference. “There’s a line I love from the Methodist communion liturgy: freed for joyful obedience. That is such a joyful thing! We need to have our hearts transformed.”

Jeff Kelly, pastor of the largest Global Methodist church in Nebraska, said he sensed the Holy Spirit changing hearts during the legislative sessions in Costa Rica.

“I’m seeing an injection of grace—that Wesleyan gift of grace,” he said.

It made him think that the new denomination might put an emphasis on the doctrine of sanctification, Kelly said. That idea could be reclaimed as the key Wesleyan distinctive.

“I think John Wesley called it the Methodist depositum,” he said. “After you’re saved, you’re not done. God is still bringing change.”

Seedbed, a publisher specializing in Wesleyan literature, currently lists two books on sanctification among its best-selling titles.

The publisher also released a hymnal in time for the convening General Conference. Editor Sterling Allen, a Global Methodist minister at a church in Houston, called it “a curated renewal of Charles Wesley’s most beloved hymns” that he hoped would serve as “a catalyst for repentance and renewal, a celebration of the joyous proclamation of the gospel, and an outpouring of the Spirit.” It includes 58 hymns on sanctifying grace, including “Spirit of Faith, Come Down,” “What is Our Calling’s Glorious Hope,” “Lord, Fill Me with a Humble Fear,” and “O Joyful Sound of Gospel Grace!”

Seedbed is also reprinting Methodist texts as pocket-sized tracts. One is John Wesley’s On Perfection. Another is The Character of a Methodist, where the founder of the movement writes that “Methodists are continually offering their whole selves to God … holding back nothing but giving all to increase the glory of God in the world.”

On the final day of the General Convention, the Global Methodists voted to change their mission statement to put more of an emphasis on sanctification. The original mission statement, put in place by transitional leadership, said the church’s goal was “to make disciples of Jesus Christ who worship passionately, love extravagantly, and witness boldly.”

David Watson, New Testament professor at United Theological Seminary and lead editor at Firebrand, said it seemed too generic to him. That mission statement would work for any evangelical megachurch—but wasn’t specifically Wesleyan.

With input from Paul Lawlor, a pastor in Memphis, and Jason E. Vickers, a professor at George W. Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor, Watson proposed an alternative. The new mission statement said, “The Global Methodist Church exists to make disciples of Jesus Christ and spread scriptural holiness across the globe.”

It passed overwhelmingly.

“What I’ve tried to do is keep us theologically grounded so we don’t lapse into mere pragmatism but stay Methodist,” Watson said. “What’s at stake is our identity as Methodists. … For us, the heart of it all is sanctification.”

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the worship band at the convening General Conference played “Oceans.”

- More from Daniel Silliman

Books

Review

The Bible Contains Discrepancies. That Doesn’t Make It Untrustworthy.

Noah M. Peterson

Scholar Michael Licona makes the case for a “flexible inerrancy.”

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

In 1983, biblical scholar Robert Gundry was ousted from the Evangelical Theological Society.

Gundry, in his lengthy commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, had suggested that Matthew tailored stories about Jesus to his specific audience, sometimes in nonhistorical ways. Theologian Norman Geisler, who spearheaded the ouster, believed this “undermine[d] confidence in the complete truthfulness of all of Scripture.” Gundry disagreed with this assessment—he affirmed the doctrine of biblical inerrancy and argued the authors of Scripture were using accepted literary standards of their day. But he was expelled nonetheless.

Thirty years later, New Testament scholar Michael Licona found himself embroiled in a similar controversy. Licona had questioned the literal historicity of Matthew’s reference to saints rising from the grave after Jesus’ resurrection (Matt. 27:52–53). Here, too, Geisler led a campaign against the perceived threat to biblical inerrancy. As a result, Licona voluntarily resigned from Southern Evangelical Seminary and left his position at the North American Mission Board. (Today, he teaches at Houston Christian University.)

The doctrine of inerrancy may be a historically recent development, but some consider it essential to the faith. In fact, Geisler believed the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture was “the foundation of all other doctrines.”

But what happens when cracks appear in that foundation? I can tell you: It’s unsettling.

During my transition from high school to college, I deconstructed the Catholic faith of my upbringing but eventually reaffirmed my belief in God and converted to Protestantism. One of the foundational building blocks of my reconstructed faith was the authority of Scripture—including my idea of inerrancy.

But then that idea was contested. Though Christians have been dealing with the topic of biblical contradictions since there was a Bible, I started earlier this year. My exposure to contradictions occurred on TikTok, where I found clips (like this one) of critical biblical scholars challenging my beliefs about what the Bible is and how it works. I learned about the two different lists of animals on the ark (Gen. 6:19–20 and 7:2–3), the potential discrepancy between 1 Chronicles and 1 Samuel about who killed Goliath, and the differing genealogies of Jesus Christ. In my high school apologetics class, I was taught that there are only apparent contradictions in the Bible, not real ones. But what if there actually are real ones?

Licona takes up this question as it relates to the Gospels in his new book, Jesus, Contradicted: Why the Gospels Tell the Same Story Differently—a shorter and more accessible version of his 2016 academic book, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? From the beginning, he’s clear where the problem lies: “Contradictions offer a challenge to the historical reliability of the Gospels and to some versions of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.” Yet he argues that they “do not necessarily call into question the truth of the Christian faith.”

The rules of ancient biography

The most skeptical position on inerrancy, as advanced by New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, treats contradictions between Gospel accounts as a reason for doubting their accuracy altogether. If the authors can’t get the minor details right, why trust them at all?

On the flip side, attempts at harmonizing the Gospels have been a popular (though not unanimous) Christian response. While some harmonizations may be legitimate, others seem far-fetched (like Peter denying Jesus six times, not three) and risk “subjecting the Gospel texts to a sort of hermeneutical waterboarding until they tell the exegete what he or she wants to hear,” as Licona put it in his 2016 book. Harmonization in the wrong place may very well lead us astray—and damage our credibility.

A third camp sees Gospel differences as grounds for rejecting the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture. This was my initial reaction as I wrestled with the biblical scholarship. The Bible, I believed, was the very Word of God, his speech in written form. But if God cannot err and the Bible has errors, then how could the Bible be divinely inspired at all? I began to think this collection of books by human authors might be just that: human.

Worse, the doubts spread. If what I had been told about the Bible was untrue, what else about Christianity was untrue? My conception of inerrancy and inspiration put my faith on shaky ground. But Licona lays out an alternative to this inflexible view of the Bible, hopefully preventing a good many Christians from falling away when they encounter contradictions too.

According to Licona, there’s a better way to handle Gospel differences, and it starts with understanding why they’re there in the first place. Licona provides a plausible explanation: Most of the differences between Gospels are due to literary conventions common to the genre of Greco-Roman (or “ancient”) biography and thus are not really contradictions or errors at all.

Importantly, ancient biography is not modern biography. Ancient biographies are playing by different rules and have different purposes. “Ancient biographers,” Licona explains, “sought to narrate sayings and deeds of the biographee that illuminated his character.” They’re portraits, not legal transcripts. The “essence” and “life” of a person are what matter, not precise details. Therefore, “Imposing modern expectations on ancient texts and authors is anachronistic since it assumes a standard not aligned with their objectives.” In ancient historiography, facts can be “reported with some elasticity.”

Matthew’s genealogy is a case in point. Luke and Matthew both contain genealogies for Jesus, but they don’t match. A popular explanation (though, as Licona points out, not among scholars) is that Matthew’s genealogy applies to Mary while Luke’s applies to Joseph. However, Matthew’s math suggests this is the wrong approach.

Despite claiming to include all the generations from Abraham to Jesus, Matthew omits multiple generations and uses “Jeconiah” twice (1:11–12). Why? He may be using a rhetorical device called “gematria,” where numbers are assigned to letters in the alphabet. In the Hebrew alphabet, the letters in “David” yield the number 14. By listing three sets of 14 generations, Licona argues, “Matthew appears to have arranged his genealogy artistically in order to communicate to his Jewish readers that Jesus is the Son of David, the Messiah.”

Understanding the rules of the game is essential to understanding what’s going on in the Gospels. Licona draws from ancient Roman compositional textbooks and Plutarch’s Lives to demonstrate six rules (or “compositional devices”) common to the genre:

Compression: presenting an event as occurring over a shorter time frame than its actual duration.
Displacement: removing an event from its original context and placing it in a different one.
Transferal: taking an action done by (or to) one person and attributing it to someone else.
Conflation: combining elements of two or more events but narrating them as one.
Simplification: omitting or altering details to abbreviate a story.
Literary spotlighting: only mentioning the person(s) in focus while being aware of others present.

When read in light of these compositional devices, many of the apparent contradictions between the Gospels disappear. Take the story about Jesus raising Jairus’s daughter from the dead: Is she about to die (as in Mark and Luke) or has she already died (as in Matthew)? While those with a preference for harmonization might posit that Jairus said both, this is more likely an example of Matthew compressing a story, as is his tendency.

For instance, in the story of Jesus healing the centurion’s servant, Luke records the centurion sending emissaries on his behalf (7:1–10), while Matthew cuts out the middlemen and has the centurion go himself (8:5–13). Likewise, Matthew compresses Mark’s account of the events following the triumphal entry (compare Mark 11:1–23 and Matt. 21:1–21). In Matthew’s version, Jesus appears at the temple once rather than twice, and the fig tree he curses withers immediately, not on the next day.

We find other examples of compositional devices at play in the Resurrection narratives. The Gospels differ in recording the number of women who visited the tomb, the number of angels at the tomb, and the number of male disciples who visited the tomb afterward. Are these errors, or merely examples of literary spotlighting?

The human element

While compositional devices clear up apparent contradictions and “errors”—calming concerns that differences between the Gospels undermine their historical reliability—they also raise issues for how we understand Scripture. They introduce a distinctly human element. The Gospel authors use sources. They paraphrase. They modify words and actions, even those of Jesus. Matthew and Luke improve upon Mark’s grammar, and Luke exhibits “editorial fatigue” (where he changes a story, but leaves leftover portions from the original, as with the parable of the talents).

Patterns like these flatly contradict the “divine dictation” view of inspiration—that the evangelists were heavenly stenographers taking down every word they received from the Holy Spirit. And though most evangelical Christians who affirm the inspiration and total inerrancy of Scripture would deny “divine dictation,” this model remains influential.

For example, the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy states that “the whole of Scripture and all its parts, down to the very words of the original, were given by divine inspiration” (emphasis added). The glaring question is “How?” While the authors concede, “The mode of divine inspiration remains largely a mystery to us,” their view of inerrancy implies a very small role for the human authors themselves.

There’s a danger in holding such a rigid view of inerrancy. If you cannot square what you believe about Scripture with what you read in Scripture, something has to give. And if you put this view of Scripture at the foundation of all your beliefs—as Geisler recommended—then the whole edifice might come tumbling down.

Licona calls his alternative “flexible inerrancy.” Under this view, “the Bible is true, trustworthy, authoritative, and without error in all that it teaches” (emphasis added). Whereas traditional inerrancy says the Bible cannot err in any way, including in the details, flexible inerrancy says the message of God is preserved despite human involvement in the composition and preservation of the biblical texts.

How is Scripture divinely inspired then? Licona proposes a theory:

God, having foreknown all possible worlds, chose to actualize the one in which the biblical authors would write what they did. On some occasions, God may have planted ideas, concepts, perhaps even the very words they would write. However, the human element is present throughout and includes imperfections.

This view isn’t entirely original. In 1999, Christian philosopher William Lane Craig argued that God orchestrated the circumstances whereby the biblical authors would write what they did, and in that sense guided the process. Similarly, Reformed theologian B. B. Warfield thought inspiration looked like “[bringing] the right men to the right places at the right times, with the right endowments, impulses, acquirements, to write just the books which were designed for them.”

The Bible doesn’t spell out how inspiration works, and we can only speculate, but such statements at least don’t contradict Scripture. For example, Licona conducts a word study of theopneustos (the word for “inspired” or “God-breathed” found in 2 Timothy 3:16) and finds, “Perhaps the closest way of describing the meaning of theopneustos is to say the thing it describes derives from God or that God is its ultimate and special origin.”

Due to the Bible’s ambiguity regarding inspiration and inerrancy, we ought not demand conformity to the most rigid conceptions of either. There should be room to question. And we should remember that there were followers of Jesus before there was a New Testament. If believing in traditional inerrancy is a litmus test for being a Christian, then Jesus’ disciples wouldn’t pass. Nor would Paul, or any members of the early church.

The Gospels as we have them accomplish what their authors intended. Though they may supply tinted windows into Jesus’ life and teachings, what we see is true and compelling. They show us who Jesus is, what he was like, and what he taught. They establish his authority and the beauty of his way of life.

If the words and deeds of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels had contradicted the living memory of Jesus, it’s unlikely they would have found such broad acceptance across the early churches. They were preserved because they taught readers how to be disciples—and they can do the same for us today, no matter our view of inerrancy.

Noah M. Peterson is a philosophy of religion graduate student at the University of Birmingham and the editor of a think tank based in Washington, DC.

- More from Noah M. Peterson

News

The Gettys’ Modern Hymn Movement Has Theological Pull

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis in Nashville

Yet even at their annual worship conference, there’s room for multiple styles of music to declare the stories of the Bible.

Keith and Kristyn Getty.

Courtesy of Getty Music

The success of “In Christ Alone” established Keith Getty as one of the leading songwriters in what he refers to as the modern hymn movement. The popular breakout song—which has remained on Christian Copyright Licensing International’s Top 100 list for over 15 years—has come to represent the musical priorities and values of Getty Music, the organization founded by Getty and his wife and collaborator Kristyn.

Their team has since developed 38 of the 500 most-used songs in US and UK churches, and Getty Music draws thousands of music-minded Christians to its annual Sing! Conference.

At the Gaylord Opryland in Nashville last month, attendees could purchase tumblers and tote bags printed with “In Christ Alone.” The song’s singable, soaring melody, simple four-verse form, and lyrics that reflect on the life, death, and resurrection of Christ have made it the model modern hymn.

“The Gettys don’t mince words about what Christ did for us,” said Jim Ouse, a repeat Sing! attendee. The 82-year-old grandfather from Wilmington, North Carolina, came with his daughter and three of her six children. “The music is theologically rich.”

For some, the Gettys and their emphasis on modern hymns represent a countermovement in the mainstream contemporary worship music industry, which is currently dominated by worship artists from megachurches like Hillsong and Elevation. Attendees of Sing! talked about their preference for hymns because of their tendency to include text that covers a lot of theological ground, and they sometimes made a comparison to more repetitive, lyrically simple, or ambiguous contemporary worship music.

The crowd at Sing! was noticeably multi-generational; babies babbled throughout the conference sessions, school-age children stood on their chairs to see the stage, and a substantial percentage of the crowd was over the age of 65. Older and younger attendees milling around the conference center spoke of the importance of singing and having access to music that explicitly conveys Reformed theology. This year’s conference theme, “Songs of the Bible,” appealed to those who prefer songs with text that they can confidently trace to the Word of God.

“If we’re going to sing, I want to sing something from Scripture,” said Karen Pederson, a retired teacher and choir director from Tioga, North Dakota.

“This music is scripturally based,” said Derrick Bridges, a musician and worship leader in Nashville. “And it’s not too complicated; it’s easy to sing.”

The perception that the Gettys operate outside or on the fringe of the mainstream worship music industry is occasionally encouraged by Keith Getty, who jokingly refers to the “dumb six-line songs” to which he offers an alternative. Fans of the Gettys see their music as a needed antidote to shallow praise and worship in their churches. The lyrical density of the Gettys’ modern hymns is a signpost of depth, and many say that their commitment to “singing theology” is what brings them to Sing!

“The theology in the music is sound, Reformed, and historically rooted,” said Daniel Troy, a software developer and volunteer at the conference. “And it’s truly congregational. It’s singable.”

Sing!’s Reformed identity comes from the Gettys’ roots in Irish Presbyterianism, as well as the relationships they have forged with influential Reformed evangelicals like John Piper, Alistair Begg, and John MacArthur. The Gettys’ popularity has grown over the past 20 years alongside the “Young, Restless, and Reformed” movement, and the emphasis on singing the “songs of the Bible” is consistent with the Calvinist practice of psalm-singing, tracing back to the 16th century.

But a scan of the event’s sponsors and partners reveals a relatively ecumenical supporting ecosystem: The Voice of the Martyrs, Crossway, Cedarville University, Planning Center, and Museum of the Bible, to name a few.

The Gettys split their time between Northern Ireland and Nashville. Their first Sing! Conference was hosted in 2017 at Brentwood Baptist Church in Music City. The now-annual event at the Opryland convention center draws thousands for three days of congregational worship, preaching, and networking. This year, over 6,500 people attended in person, representing 50 US states and 32 countries. According to Getty Music, over 30,000 viewers tuned in to the conference livestream.

The Gettys’ emphasis on text-focused hymnody and incorporation of musical characteristics and genre markers from folk music, traditional Irish music, and bluegrass have helped them carve out a unique niche in the landscape of contemporary praise and worship music. Their varied style has also attracted devoted fans who are willing to travel to participate in an annual worship conference.

Graham Ellis, an 83-year-old concert organizer from Wales, said he came to volunteer at Sing! because he believes that the Gettys’ music is part of a project that all Christians can get behind: enriching the worship of the global church through music that teaches the Bible in a Bible-illiterate world.

“I want people to come and hear the Bible and to be ministered to,” said Ellis. “The Gettys’ goal is to teach the Scriptures, evangelize the world, and reach whole families.”

Elaine Koester, a retired Reformed minister from rural Indiana, said that the Gettys’ “excellent music with excellent theology” is what drew her to the conference. “The music and worship is all shaped by the Word of God.”

A recurrent feature of this year’s conference was the forthcoming Sing! Hymnal, which the Gettys are publishing with Crossway in 2025. A small prototype of the hymnal was provided to each attendee at this year’s conference, and when Keith Getty addressed the crowd at the opening of the first session, he said, “Please turn to number four in your hymnal.”

Thousands stood and turned to the hymn “All PeopleThat on Earth Do Dwell” (the final verse of the hymn is recognized by many as “The Doxology”) as a synthesized organ played the opening chords.

Baton in hand, Getty conducted the conference congregation, eventually joined by an orchestra. In addition to the hymnals in their hands, singers had access to the written notation and text on the projection screens. The second selection was “How Great Thou Art,” which the congregation sang with equal gusto.

Historically, “How Great Thou Art” and the tune “Old Hundredth” (to which “The Doxology” and “All Creatures That on Earth Do Dwell” are both set) are separated by centuries. The former took shape across the 19th and 20th centuries, eventually popularized in the US by Billy Graham’s crusades. The latter is a hymn tune first published in the 1551 Genevan Psalter.

At Sing!, these beloved hymns of the faith from different eras of church history are part of the same cultural project. They support the modern hymn movement by providing both a model and a musical lineage for new songs that are conceived of as “hymn-like” rather than as additions to the digital songbook of contemporary praise and worship music.

While most people on the platform at Sing! didn’t openly criticize contemporary worship music or its most popular creators, many attendees agreed the music of the Gettys and the songwriters on their team is a welcome departure from what they perceive as more “mainstream” worship music. Some of the endorsements in the sample Sing! Hymnal suggest that the Gettys are reviving a better or truer form of musical worship.

The Gettys “have been used by the Lord to provide theologically rich, singable music for the church in this generation,” wrote John MacArthur, pastor of Grace Community Church in California and Chancellor of Master’s Seminary, a prominently featured sponsor of the conference. “More than anyone else they have led in the long-awaited revival of hymns which have always been the true music of the church.”

In his endorsement, Alistair Begg, pastor of Parkside Church in Ohio (where the Gettys once served as worship leaders), called the hymnal “theologically sound and melodically enlivening.” Joni Eareckson Tada, founder of the Joni and Friends International Disability Center, wrote, “This hymnal will be a timeless collection of theologically rich songs that will set your heart soaring!”

Despite the implication that modern hymns have a monopoly on “theological richness,” the distinction between the modern hymn movement and the broader world of contemporary praise and worship is blurry, even at Sing!

The cohort of performers and cowriters gathered by the Gettys is not an exclusively modern hymn-focused group. On the second night of the conference, recording artist and author Andrew Peterson staged a performance of his selections from his concept album, Behold the Lamb of God. Sandra McCracken, a singer-songwriter who has collaborated with numerous popular worship artists like All Sons & Daughters, is also on the Gettys’ writing team.

On the final evening of the conference, special guest and contemporary Christian music giant Michael W. Smith appeared for a short on-stage conversation with Keith Getty followed by a performance of Smith’s “Agnus Dei.”

In many ways, “Agnus Dei” is a quintessential contemporary worship song, featuring two simple sections, “Alleluia, for the Lord God Almighty Reigns” and “Holy, holy are you Lord God Almighty / Worthy is the Lamb, Amen,” that can be repeated and varied in intensity.

The vocal line stretches the first syllable of “Alleluia” over multiple notes, a contrast to the text-focused, syllabic writing (one syllable per note) of the Gettys’ music. The song’s lyrics are from Revelation chapters 4 and 5, making it an easy fit for the theme, “Songs of the Bible,” but the selection was, nonetheless, a contrast—perhaps a nod to the potential for the modern hymn movement to act not as an antagonistic contrast to other popular worship music but as a partner.

In his sermon during the first plenary session, John Piper spoke at length about the relationship between heart and mind in musical worship. The influential pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis affirmed the importance of theologically sound text, with a caution against treating it as a goal in itself.

“I don’t want anyone to assume that Scripture is an end in itself, that truth is an end in itself, that lyrics are an end in themselves. They are servants of Godward emotions,” Piper said. “The mind exists to serve the heart … right thinking is never an end in itself.”

Singing words that expound theology, in Piper’s view, ought to be in service of turning one’s heart and affections toward God. At a gathering where so many in the crowd spoke of their commitment to “theologically rich” text, Piper’s sermon seemed directed against putting particular songs in a spiritual hierarchy.

For attendees like Stan Fitzenrider, the Gettys’ music isn’t appealing because he believes it’s “better” in some way but because it speaks to his emotions. The form and characteristics of hymns are more familiar to him and closely associated with his own faith journey.

“When my wife died a few years ago, this music really touched me,” said Fitzenrider, 73. “It brought me closer to God and helped me heal.”

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

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