Evangelicals Tap Power of the Sun—and Government Rebates

More churches embracing solar power to care for creation and cut energy costs.

Campton Baptist Church used to have an annual fundraiser to pay the power bill. Heating the eastern Kentucky church building cost thousands of dollars every winter, and the small Southern Baptist congregation of about 25 didn’t get that kind of money in the collection plate.

Today, the church still has the fundraiser, but the money all goes to scholarships, helping young people from one of the poorest counties in America pay for the first year of college.

The church’s electricity bill is $0.

“We have 22 solar panels on our parsonage,” said Zach Collier, the church’s pastor, who also teaches science at the local high school and drives a school bus. “The main church building has 30 panels on one part, 28 on another, and then 20 on the education building. Enough to cancel out our utility bill.”

Campton is one of about 2,500 houses of worship that have switched to solar power in the last decade. Most are liberal Protestant: Quakers, Mennonites, Lutherans, and Episcopalians. But a handful of evangelical congregations have gone green too.

Baptists from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mojave Desert have hooked up solar arrays. The sun now powers a Bible church in central Pennsylvania, an Assemblies of God church in California’s San Joaquin Valley, a Christian Reformed Church in cloudy Michigan, and about a dozen other evangelical congregations.

The World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) once hoped to get 20 percent of its members converted to clean energy by 2025. They fell far short.

“It was aspirational,” Chris Elisara, executive director of the WEA’s Creation Care Task Force, told Christianity Today. “We just haven’t been able to follow through, to be frank. That was prior to COVID, and things pretty much shut down over COVID.”

But some evangelical congregations did move forward with solar power projects. And they are reaping the benefits.

Many of them are concerned about climate change and want to find ways to better steward God’s creation, but they are also motivated by practical realities and basic financial concerns.

“I don’t know many ministries that have tons of money,” said Allen Drew, a Christian Reformed Church pastor in Pennsylvania and a regional organizer for the denomination’s Climate Witness Project. “You have an open roof space? You have the capacity to generate revenue for the church and its ministry. Fund your ministry! God’s given you a fusion reactor in the sky. You just need a way to tap it.”

Accessing the power of the sun has gotten easier for churches since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. The legislation addressed environmental concerns more directly than economic ones (despite the name of the bill) and was hailed by President Joe Biden’s administration as “the most significant action Congress has taken on clean energy and climate change in the nation’s history.”

The new law included a provision offering rebates to nonprofits that install solar energy systems.

President George W. Bush signed a similar provision into law in 2005, giving tax credits to people installing solar setups on private residences. Industry experts say it had a dramatic impact. The total number of homes with solar panels increased from about 100,000 in 2005 to 3.2 million today. The Inflation Reduction Act could do something similar for churches.

Projects cost between $20,000 and $300,000, according to experts who spoke to CT. Now, churches can file tax forms to receive a 30 percent refund.

Interfaith Power and Light, a Washington, DC, nonprofit, has helped more than 30 congregations navigate the unfamiliar process.

“A church I was talking to recently had to figure out how to get a tax ID number,” said communications manager Jessica Quinn. “A lot of them don’t have one because they’re not taxed, but they have to file for tax credits through the direct pay program.”

Solar Faithful, a Muskegon, Michigan, company that specializes in working with religious organizations, has recently installed solar arrays for 10 congregations. All of them applied for and received government rebates. More than 150 other Michigan churches have reached out to Solar Faithful, expressing interest in getting solar power systems set up.

Churches generally pay for installation with a combination of building funds, special donations, and grant money. There are also more complicated financial arrangements that have emerged in recent years to make funding easier for churches:

The expertise and financing have been missing,” said Rob Rafson, president of Solar Faithful. “The Inflation Reduction Act has attracted a lot of finance groups to support development and even specialty financing, things like bridge loans—pieces of the financial puzzle that weren’t available before.

Solar Faithful sets up a power-purchasing contract with the churches, so they don’t have to pay anything up front. The company owns the solar panels on the church, and the church buys the electricity they generate, with prices guaranteed to be at least 10 percent below what they paid before.

That is an increasingly common financial arrangement.

Palm Valley Church in Goodyear, Arizona, recently agreed to a deal like this. The nondenominational megachurch worked with WattHub Renewables, a commercial developer, to install a 622-panel solar array on its vast, big-box roof. The panels are projected to reduce the church’s carbon emissions by about 375 tons per year and its energy bills by 30 percent.

Funding for the project was arranged by Sunrock Distributed Generation, a two-year-old company that specializes in financing this kind of development. Founder and CEO Wilson Chang said the company has successfully recruited major investors by packaging the small and medium-sized projects into investment funds that are very attractive on Wall Street.

“We’re putting it in a pool so there’s a very diversified risk,” Chang told CT. “At the end of the day, people pay their utility bills.”

The government rebate to offset initial costs makes the math even better for potential investors, Chang said. And it’s good for churches: They don’t have to pay anything up front, and solar panels help them hedge against rising energy prices.

Sunrock’s formula for calculating costs assumes that energy rates will increase about 3 percent per year. In 2022, however, consumers saw prices go up an average of 14 percent, more than twice the rate of inflation, according to government reports. Inflation is down in 2024, but electricity costs are still up nearly 4 percent for the year.

Aging power grid infrastructure could also cause prices to spike in the future, according to Chang.

“People want … to use clean power,” he said. “This will also save them money.”

There are other creative ways to finance solar power. Eight members of Bethany Christian Reformed Church in Gallup, New Mexico, started a limited liability company that paid to install 100 solar panels during a building renovation. It cost about $90,000, which was brought down to $63,000 by the rebate.

Now the group sells power to the church at a fixed price. They are not seeing the 5 percent returns they had originally projected, partly because they paid for more solar panels than they needed and the price the utility company pays for excess electricity is very low. They also set their rates low so Bethany saves more money.

That’s fine with Rick Kruis, the longtime member and retired doctor who headed up the project. He’s been working on creation care since he started a recycling program as a student at Dordt University.

“I’ve been a ‘tree hugger’ since college and before that, my dad was a lay preacher who installed solar in our home in the late 1960s,” Kruis said. “A lot of people in our congregation are concerned about the environment. We’ve talked a lot about climate change and creation care and wanted to do something.”

Even where climate change is not a top priority, however, more evangelicals are embracing solar power.

In eastern Kentucky, Southern Baptists don’t talk about the environment all the time. Collier, the pastor at Campton Baptist Church, told CT he couldn’t remember that he’d ever preached on the topic.

“Climate change is, by its nature, a slower process, so most people here don’t worry about it every day,” Collier said. “We do worry about whether we can pay the bills. We want to have more programs in our building and love our neighbors, and solar power helps with all of that.”

Daniel Silliman is senior news editor for Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Solar Money Empowers Churches".

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News

Biblical Archaeology Gets Subatomic Help

Gordon Govier

New tool finds use where digging is practically or politically impossible in Jerusalem.

Some of the ancient history underneath Jerusalem is easily accessible.

Pilgrims and tourists can get their feet wet in the Siloam Tunnel, carved by order of King Hezekiah to bring water inside the walls of the city (2 Kings 20:20). The Western Wall Tunnel, excavated in the late 20th century, traces a first-century street from the Western Wall to the path that Jesus is traditionally thought to have walked to his crucifixion. Archaeologists are currently excavating another street that pilgrims used in Jesus’ day to go from the Pool of Siloam (John 9:7) up to the Temple Mount.

But other parts of the city’s 5,000-year history are harder to get to—if not impossible. Practical and political problems prohibit access, even for the experts trying to do research.

Now, however, physicists have come up with a new way to dig without digging: muography.

Muons are tiny subatomic particles that are everywhere on earth, according to physicists. They are created when cosmic rays smash into the Earth’s atmosphere, showering the surface of the planet with about 10,000 of the particles per square meter.

In recent years, scientists have figured out how to use muon detectors to map inaccessible subterranean cavities, creating images of rooms inside Egyptian pyramids and magma chambers deep in volcanoes. Now they’re using them to map the streets Jesus once walked in ancient Jerusalem.

Last year, a team of Tel Aviv University archaeologists and physicists shoehorned an unwieldy homemade muon detector—you can’t buy one from a store—into a rocky cavern close to the Gihon Spring in the Kidron Valley. They placed another detector behind a rocky bulwark called the Stepped Stone Structure. Then they pointed them both toward the Temple Mount and turned them on.

Here’s how they work: Muons have about 10,000 times the energy of a typical x-ray. They can easily pass through rock and earth—and anything less dense, like plants and people—but the denser the material they pass through, the quicker they lose their energy.

When muons hit the detectors with different energy levels, an image can be created of the density of the matter through which they passed. Empty spaces are easily distinguished. And archaeologists can “see” underground.

Eventually the Tel Aviv team hopes to have 10 or more detectors near the Temple Mount, the contested holy site where traditional digging would create an impossible uproar.

“Jerusalem would seem to me to be as good a place as you could ever have for exploring this new technology,” said John Monson, professor of Old Testament and Semitic languages at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Monson grew up in Jerusalem, where his father taught at the Institute for Holyland Studies (now Jerusalem University College).

He can tell hundreds of stories about the biblical sites he visited as a child and later as a student and professor. He loves the history of archaeology and the evolution of archaeological methods. In many cases, Monson said, new discoveries have come through the development of new tools, which open up new ways of exploring.

“When you look at Jerusalem, exploration has been pushed forward by whatever technology has been available across the generations,” he told CT. “This looks to me to be a very, very promising tool.”

At the same time, Monson acknowledges that every technology has downsides. And there are always limitations.

That’s a caution echoed by Jodi Magness, author of the new book Jerusalem Through the Ages.

Magness, professor of early Judaism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says any kind of new technology will yield new information. But it may not be very much or very useful.

Archaeologists are already aware they won’t work in every situation. Muon detectors need to be placed beneath the areas they are imaging, which limits where they can be used. Also, each detector costs about $100,000 to build.

The new tool has other obvious limitations. Archaeologists may be able to see an image of a cavern, but the muon detector “won’t tell you what it is, or what its date is,” Magness said. “It can be used in conjunction with other methods, but it’s not going to be a substitute for them.”

It still may, however, lead to significant new discoveries. Israeli archaeologists have been peeling back the layers of history underneath what was once the Givati Parking Lot, just outside the Temple Mount area.

Their digging has discovered remains of palaces and other significant buildings, identified the location of the mysterious Acra fortress of the Maccabees, and revealed a previously unknown moat that defended the city, perhaps as far back as the time of David.

The opportunity to excavate such a comparatively large space in a city like Jerusalem is rare.

“Usually you’re just excavating one little part and trying to figure out what the rest is,” Magness said. “When you get the opportunity to excavate in a large area like this, you’re able to get a much bigger picture—a broader and more accurate picture.”

The muon detectors, as they’re currently deployed, are pointed toward an area next to the Givati excavation. Perhaps they will help answer some of the questions raised by the archaeologists digging in the parking lot. Perhaps they will show the length of the newly discovered moat.

Or perhaps archaeologists will make altogether new discoveries with muon detectors.

Wherever the technology leads, though, scholars are glad to have more options. It’s good, too, to have ways to see under the surface of the city that are less invasive than traditional means of uncovering the past.

“What we are doing in archaeology is essentially destructive when we dig,” Monson said. “Maybe muography offers … something that’s not destructive.”

Gordon Govier writes about biblical archaeology for Christianity Today, hosts the archaeology radio program The Book and The Spade, and is the editor of Artifax.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Seeing Under Jerusalem".

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Ideas

Pilgrim at Plaster Creek

Sara Kyoungah White

Christ comes to make all things new—even West Michigan’s most polluted watershed.

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

I live by a creek, Plaster Creek, in a former oak grove in West Michigan.

Every so often, I walk down a busy street in my part of Grand Rapids, past rows of brick and vinyl-sided houses, a church, and two schools, and turn onto a path that takes me to the sound of rushing water.

The creek is difficult to find unless you know where to look. Parts of its arms have long been buried in tunnels beneath the asphalt to make way for busy streets and big-box stores. Each time I reach it, my heartbeat quickens, as though I’m hearing the voice of a friend.

This friend is deathly ill. Its 25.9 miles of length is overrun with toxic substances, thermal pollution, and E. coli contamination—sometimes orders of magnitude higher than what is safe. When it rains, flash floods eat away at its jagged banks. The neglected undergrowth is caked in layers of old garbage, and plastic bags are caught in the branches of overhanging trees—many of which lie tipped on their sides, roots exposed. A sewage smell hangs in the air.

One early winter day last year, I arrived at the creek to find two rotting pumpkins sticking out of the water like orange sores. Human contact with the water is prohibited, so I simply stood on the bridge for a few moments.

Looking at the overwhelming list of creation care priorities—disappearing rainforests and glaciers, species on the brink of extinction, extreme weather patterns, the warming ocean—it would be easy to wonder why one creek should matter. But when I stand on the bridge over Plaster Creek, I am reminded that the story of humankind began near running waters like this one, in Eden, where Adam and Eve were formed in its heart and tasked with tending it.

Only after the Fall was humanity separated from the garden and its life, set at odds against each other and the earth. “Cursed is the ground because of you,” God says to Adam in Genesis 3 before he banishes man and wife, setting “a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life” (vv. 17, 24). Our rejection of God broke our relationship not only with him but with his creation. Millennia later, the proof is in the creek.

It’s true—gloriously so—that we are not condemned to remain in brokenness forever. We celebrate Christ’s incarnation in this season, and all around us are reminders that a return to God’s Edenic intent is nigh.

But that time has not yet come in full. We are still singing, “O come, O come, Emmanuel,” and all of creation joins us in our longing for the day when threat and decay will be no more and even the smallest creeks will be made new.

Two hundred years ago, Plaster Creek was called Ken-O-Sha (“water of the walleye”) by the Ottawa people who lived along its banks.

The Ottawa had a tenuous relationship with European settlers in the young city, as treaties were increasingly driving the Indigenous peoples farther west. Mayor Charles Belknap recounted a disagreement that happened during this time between an Ottawa elder named Mack-a-de-penessy (Chief Blackbird) and a Christian missionary.

Chief Blackbird said the best place to encounter God was outdoors; he couldn’t see why the missionary kept trying to convince his tribesmen to go inside a building. So the chief invited the missionary to come with him in his canoe to where the Ken-O-Sha met the Grand River. There, an impressive waterfall cascaded over a huge orange rock. This, the chief said, was where he and his people met the divine.

The missionary sent a sample of that outcropping to Detroit for analysis. The results confirmed that the rock was gypsum, a valuable resource used as a fertilizer and for making plaster. Until this time, plaster had been imported from as far away as Nova Scotia. But now it could be mined locally.

The first plaster mill in West Michigan opened on Chief Blackbird’s sacred spot in 1841. Not long after, Ken-O-Sha’s name was changed to Plaster Creek. By 1850, the company was mining 60 tons of gypsum a day, and by 1890, there were 13 mines in the area, shipping the resource as far away as California.

At the same time, the walleye fish that once teemed in the creek vanished, along with the Ottawa and other Indigenous groups. In 1910, one local, Charles W. Garfield, wrote, “Instead of being the beautiful even-flowing stream throughout the year, as in my childhood, [Plaster Creek] is now a most fitful affair. … A near sighted utilitarianism has snatched it away.”

As Grand Rapids moved on from gypsum mining to furniture making, the creek became a dumping ground for toxic waste. The poor water quality meant humans were not allowed to touch it, much less wade in it, while the nonhuman life in and around the creek suffered, including the endangered snuffbox mussel, sunfish, and salmon, as well as minks, herons, deer, and foxes. People growing up in the 1960s recalled that the creek would sometimes be bright red, sometimes green, from various paints poured into it, and there was always the lingering scent of lacquer.

By the early 2000s, Plaster Creek had become West Michigan’s most polluted waterway.

The creek in my neighborhood is only one example in a national epidemic. Today, nearly half of all rivers and streams and more than a third of all lakes in the US are so polluted that swimming and fishing in them are banned. A 2021 Gallup poll found that the pollution of drinking water—more than global warming, air pollution, or the extinction of plant and animal species—is the No. 1 environmental concern among American adults.

In 1975, Annie Dillard won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a poetic chronicling of her creek-side year in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. But even Dillard’s Tinker Creek was not immune to the effects of industrialization and pollution.

In 2012, Virginia was listed as the second-worst state in the country for toxic chemical dumping in waterways, with more than 18 million pounds of chemicals like arsenic, mercury, and benzene released annually into streams. In 2017, a chemical spill in Tinker Creek killed 40,000 fish, and in 2020, petroleum-based contaminants created a malodorous sheen on the water, resulting in a ban on human contact.

If Dillard had been writing her book in the 21st century, she may not even have been able to touch it.

Waterways like Plaster Creek are small veins in a huge system, but what happens in them has large-scale consequences. Plaster Creek empties into the Grand River, and the Grand River flows into Lake Michigan, connected to the other Great Lakes. Together, the lakes comprise nearly one-fifth of the planet’s total fresh water supply.

There is a long tradition, especially in America, of seeing the ideal state of nature as pristine and removed from the bustle of civilization, what some have called the “wilderness myth.” When Yosemite National Park was promoted to the American public, for example, it was portrayed as wild, unspoiled lands, intentionally wiped clean of traces of civilization. In truth, early photographers like Ansel Adams “assiduously avoided photographing any of the local Miwok who were rarely out of his sight as he worked Yosemite Valley,” noted journalist Mark Dowie.

Environmental historians like William Cronon have said that seeing nature in this idyllic way sets up a false, mutually exclusive dichotomy between nature and people, leading to neglect and exploitation. But there’s a theological dimension here too: The wilderness myth is not just wrong; it is unbiblical.

When God made the world, he did not put humans in one place and Eden in another. He formed man from the dust of the garden and said it was very good. And even after the Fall, when the Son of Man came to earth, he did not cut humans out of the picture. He united himself with us as a helpless baby, as a man who wept and ate and slept and prayed, as a man who died. There were no rose-tinted glasses or carefully filtered photographs when Jesus shouldered the full weight of creation’s sin and decay.

“In Jesus, God dwelt among us, taking on flesh and entering into creation, participating in the very life and matter of the world,” states Christian environmental group A Rocha International’s Commitment to Creation Care. And through Jesus’ death, “God defeated the power of sin and death and accomplished the reconciliation of all things—human and nonhuman—giving hope for all that is broken and spoiled, and eternal life to all who receive Him.”

In Christ, humanity—and all of creation—is not mythologized or cut out of a picture but redeemed. In Christ, God looks at all he has made and says once more that it is good.

And just as at the dawn of creation, his words have the power to enact what they pronounce.

One snowy Sunday afternoon, 40 members of my church donned work gloves and winter coats to pick up trash along two sections of Plaster Creek. Before heading out, my husband, the pastor, read from Our World Belongs to God, our denomination’s hymn-like articulation of Reformed confessions:

As followers of Jesus Christ,
living in this world—
which some seek to control,
and others view with despair—
we declare with joy and trust:
Our world belongs to God!

With this proclamation echoing in our ears, we reached the creek. The kids in our group treated the cleanup like a treasure hunt, comparing who could get the grossest find—my 9-year-old son proudly held up a dirty diaper while his friend boasted about a moldy bottle. On my way to drop off some glass shards in the sharps pile we had demarcated with a circle of twigs, a young woman in our group silently pointed out a person sleeping in the ledge beneath the bridge, wrapped in what looked like a large plastic sheet.

At the end of an hour, we filled the entire back of a van with stuffed trash bags. The group at the other section filled a trailer and a pickup truck. I overheard someone remarking in the parking lot, “We could have done this for four more hours and still picked up more trash.” Everyone’s cheeks were red in the blustery wind, and we blinked snowflakes out of our eyelashes.

In the early 2000s, Plaster Creek wasn’t on the radar of churches like ours, and no Christian organizations advocated on its behalf. That changed when Gail Heffner, then the director of community engagement for Calvin College (now Calvin University), together with Dave Warners, a Calvin ecology and biology professor, heard that the Plaster Creek watershed was “in really bad shape.”

Watersheds—areas of land that channel precipitation and runoff into a common body of water—are connected, like bowls that flow into larger bowls. More importantly, every human on earth lives in one. For Heffner and Warners, Plaster Creek wasn’t just any watershed—it was the one the college is located in.

“We started going to some community meetings just to listen, to find out what they were telling us,” Heffner said, shifting in her seat in the small conference room at Calvin’s Science Building where we met. “At that point, we didn’t know a lot about the Plaster Creek watershed.”

Most of the pollution in Plaster Creek today is not because of hazardous waste dumping like it was in earlier decades. That was curtailed by national laws like the Clean Water Act of 1972. Heffner and Warners learned the pollution was mostly caused by agricultural runoff from upstream areas south of Grand Rapids. When it rained, stormwater washed huge amounts of excess fertilizer in the form of high phosphorus and nitrogen content into the creek, which became increasingly polluted with livestock excrement, runoff sediments, garbage, and oils as it moved downstream into poorer urban communities like ours before joining the Grand River.

The upstream agricultural community was also made up of many Christians. In 2008, a senior staff member of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality turned to Warners and Heffner for help. “They said, ‘Look, there are Christians upstream who are refusing to listen to us,’” Heffner recalled. “‘But maybe they’ll listen to you.’”

Heffner and Warners launched Plaster Creek Stewards (PCS) shortly thereafter in 2009 as one of the country’s only Christian watershed programs and one of the few connected to a university. But they quickly found that few believers were interested in the health of the creek. In fact, some directly opposed the work of PCS, going so far as to send physically threatening messages to its staff.

One way to help decrease pollution in waterways like Plaster Creek is to slow down the flow of water coming into it in the first place. PCS thus focuses on installing porous parking lots, rain gardens, bioswales, retention basins, and floodplains. When PCS tried to install a large floodplain at a local park, however, widely circulating misinformation led the community to believe that their beloved Dutton Shadyside Park was about to be ruined.

“We learned the hard way that public projects require intensive listening to and partnering with the community,” Warners said.

After two years of wading through an appeal process in courts, PCS received a permit to proceed, with significant adjustments to honor some of the concerns expressed by the park users, like preserving several historical trees, keeping a green space for an annual dog show, and adding a new pedestrian bridge.

When construction finally began, hundreds of local students, churches, businesses, and neighbors came to help.

“In its consciousness, ours is an upland society,” essayist and poet Wendell Berry notes. Indeed, we are unaware of the outcomes of our consumptions and practices. “The ruin of watersheds, and what that involves and means, is little considered.”

Consciousness stirs when creation care is no longer an abstract concept but actual dirt on our hands. At our church’s cleanup event, my son, his bag of litter slung over one shoulder, looked up at me and said, “Mama, this is our creek, right?” An act as simple as picking up a soiled candy wrapper sends a message: I care about the cleanliness of this place. I care about it like it’s my own.

Churches, including ours, have found that this kind of hands-on care also resonates with the communities they’re trying to reach.

“We find that a lot of folks, [when] we’d say, ‘Come to our church picnic,’ they’d say, ‘No, thanks,’” shared one man interviewed by Heffner and Warners in their book, Reconciliation in a Michigan Watershed: Restoring Ken-O-Sha. But when neighbors would find out the church was going to clean up the creek, he said they’d respond, “‘Can I come with you?’ And then it is something that we are doing alongside our neighbors, [where] we get to illustrate God’s love for creation, and his love for this neighborhood.”

Restoring the creek is slow work. Contaminants in moving bodies of water are notoriously hard to measure due to their erratic fluctuations. “It’s taken several hundred years for the creek to get this bad,” Warners said. “It’s going to probably take several decades of concerted effort to be able to get it better.”

Some of the people most passionate about PCS’s work are young people. For many students, learning, research, and experimentation extend beyond academics. They’re a tangible act of caring for the earth among a generation where more than 4 in 10 say we’ve hit “the point of no return” with the environment, according to a 2021 Deloitte survey.

Engineering students at Calvin have built a hydraulic model of a section of the creek to aid research. History students have studied land-use patterns over time in the watershed. One year, a taxonomy group found beak grass, the only known patch of the endangered species in the county.

Warners recalls how one student came to his office firing off questions about PCS’s work before saying tearfully, “It’s been hard to have hope lately. But what you’re doing for this creek is beautiful.”

When we are children, our backyards and parks are our wildernesses—every tree and bush aflame with glory. I remember my siblings and I spending a summer hunched under the tent-like canopy of a pine tree, only several feet from the sidewalk, imagining that we were in a forest. In the winter, we tried our best to walk without a sound across the snow, exploring our tiny plot of land in an Ohio suburb. New discoveries—the long icicles on the edges of the house, the tracks of a creature leading into the brush—were as mysterious as finding a lamppost in the middle of a snowy wood.

Childlike wonder is something we as adults must relearn this side of the Resurrection: a re-visioning of nature as our home and our keeping, as something more like Eden, where creation flourished in the care of humankind.

Here in southeast Grand Rapids, that happens when I look up into the massive crown of the ancient oak tree in our yard and when I trace the hairline fractures in our old plaster walls. It happens each time I walk to our neighborhood creek and recall the vision in Revelation and what it means for creeks like this one.

Courtesy of Gail Gunst Heffner

College students collect data for a biology class at Plaster Creek.

It is a vision toward which all of history is pointing: a re-peopling of Eden, not as an untouched wilderness but as a garden-city through which runs the river of life, “clear as crystal” and “flowing from the throne of God” (Rev. 22:1). Along its banks will be planted the tree of life, the apostle John tells us, whose leaves will be used for the healing of the nations (v. 2).

That healing is not an abstract concept for nature “out there” and temporally far away. It is a promise for our own backyards, our neighborhood parks, our creeks—every place where we walk, day in and day out.

I have faith that when the new creation comes, the healing leaves will be brought to Plaster Creek too; that children, including my own, will be able to splash in its waters without fear. On that day, even the impossibly high cost of forgiveness for all that was wrought—the violent expulsion of the Ottawa, the exploiting of land and water, the conflicts that rend the body of Christ—will be paid for in full, even to overflowing.

Even now, there are glimmers of newness in every direction. Warners says that, in the spring, when new species of butterflies or birds visit native gardens they’ve placed in the neighborhoods alongside the creek, it’s like the triangle of God, humankind, and creation is restored. It’s then that he can keep hoping and working toward the day when Plaster Creek will be called “water of the walleye” again.

Meanwhile, each year in our neighborhood, I see more and more houses transforming the strips of grass between sidewalk and curb into rain gardens. Last summer, hundreds of community members painted a mural along a neglected 2,000-square-foot stretch of cement wall beside the creek. There are reports that sturgeon, another species of fish that disappeared, are returning to the Grand River.

On our neighborhood Facebook page, there’s a long thread about how we can care for those without homes camping near the creek, especially as winter draws near. Next summer, like every summer we’ve lived here, teams of high school students with PCS will walk laughing down the sidewalk outside my window with shovels in hand, off to sow more seedlings. People at our church are asking when the next cleanup day will be—pilgrims, all of us, beside Plaster Creek, waiting as we listen for resurrection to be spoken over every rivulet.

Sara Kyoungah White is an editor at Christianity Today.

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Theology

Let Heaven and Nature Wail

Russell Moore

Editor in Chief

In this season, a baby’s cry can say more than a simple “Merry Christmas.”

Illustration by James Walton

To see how much we really want to peer into the mystery of the Incarnation, go to a Christmas pageant and note whether there’s a plastic doll in the manger or a live baby.

The doll makes more sense, of course, because babies aren’t predictable. A director can’t give notes as to when a cry might drown out a shepherd’s lines or when loud wailing might ruin the mood leading into the singing of “Silent Night.” In the crying, though, we hear a better echo of Bethlehem.

Our life histories start with our own “nativity scenes”—usually, these days, under fluorescent hospital lights. We don’t remember any of that about ourselves, of course, but some of us get to see that origin story of a child. The moment leaves some people, such as writer Carlos Fuentes, silent with awe.

“I cannot explain it. Nor can I imagine it. I can only bear witness to it,” Fuentes wrote of watching the birth of his first child. “The moment Cecilia emerged and cried out for the first time, I knew that I was hearing a proclamation of nature, the newest, but also the most ancient.”

He continued,

To hear the voice of a human being coming into the world is to hear the echo of the origin of all things. To hear an impassioned song. When a little girl is born she doesn’t cry out simply because it’s the most natural thing to do. Her true nature is asserting itself at that moment, through her voice, the conduit that carries her toward society, culture, love. The miracle of birth is nothing more than that.

Human babies cry. In those cries we hear pleas to be fed, to be held or changed, or to be sheltered from loud noises or bright lights. Sometimes we don’t know how to decipher what’s behind those yells and tears.

Literary scholar Jonathan Rogers once noted that the English word infant is rooted in language for one who is “too young to speak.” The cry, and the response to that cry, is part of how an infant learns to attach to parents.

“In responding to the child’s needs for food, for relief from pain, for loving contact, the parent is helping her identify her wants, and how they can be fulfilled,” writes philosopher Charles Taylor. “What could otherwise turn into emotional storms of frustration are given a definite purpose and a recognizable remedy.” It’s from this interchange, which Taylor calls “communion,” that language emerges and a life is given shape.

Sigmund Freud saw in the state of the demanding, crying infant a kind of “limitless narcissism,” and he saw the longing to return to that state as being part of the motivation for spirituality. “The origin of the religious attitude can be traced back in clear outlines as far as the feeling of infantile helplessness,” he wrote. “There may be something further behind that, but for the present it is wrapped in obscurity.”

The words something further behind that are carrying a lot of weight there. As in many areas, Freud’s reductionism doesn’t fare well in further study.

Ariel Dorfman notes that psychologists have discovered an infant cries louder when hearing the distressed cries of other infants. That’s true even compared to playing back an audio recording of the baby’s own cries. Dorfman said,

Think about it: a baby is more upset by the voice of someone else’s agony than by her own troubles. The baby intensifies the cries in solidarity with the other, shares the pain, signals to the other child that he is not alone. For me, this is proof, if we ever required it, that compassion is ingrained in our species, coded inside the circuits of our brain. This is how we managed to become human, by creating the conditions for a social network where the suffering of others is intolerable, where we need to pity and comfort the afflicted.

But, as with other matters of human motivation, Freud is partly right. A cry does reveal the baby’s utter dependence and vulnerability before powers out of the baby’s control, powers that Freud labels “fate.”

The apostle Paul called such uncontrollable forces the “elementary principles of the world,” to which we were once enslaved (Gal. 4:9, ESV throughout). That slavery is to what Paul labeled “the flesh”—our chaotic desires and needs severed from the God who loves us. The interruption of that slavery does not start with heroic action or even with disciplined maturity but with a cry, as if from a baby: “Abba! Father!” (Rom. 8:15).

That cry isn’t a fully articulated or articulatable expression of needs but rather the vulnerable dependence sometimes conveyed as “groanings too deep for words” (v. 26). That’s because we, like a newborn, cannot verbalize or conceptualize what we want, much less what we need.

Jesus taught us that we did not need to approach God with “many words” or “empty phrases,” since our Father knows what we need before we ask him (Matt. 6:7–8). Our prayer, then, isn’t an advance into spiritual mastery but a falling back into something so primal that it’s what we were trying to do when we still had our umbilical cords. We learn to say “our Father” before we even learn to ask for “our daily bread” (vv. 9, 11).

It is only to be expected that what the Spirit does in us immediately after our second birth is what the Word that called us into existence primed us to do: cry out. And in the second birth, as in the first, we sometimes thrash around, alarmed by what seems to be chaos. Only later do we see that what seemed to be a crisis was the entrance into life.

One of the mysteries of the Incarnation is that the Word who called the heavens and earth into being became flesh—beginning right where we did, as a baby whose words were only wails. Those crying baby sounds say more than a cheery “Merry Christmas” ever could. And when they interrupt our pageants or carols, let’s stop, just for a moment, in awe.

Let heaven and nature scream. In those cries, we just might hear a familiar voice.

Russell Moore is CT’s editor in chief.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "The Incarnation of Jesus Lets Heaven and Nature Scream".

Ideas

I’m Estranged from My Parents. I Still Love Them.

Carrie McKean

Even when family ties are severed, God does not cut off his care.

Illustration by Jennifer Sampson

The box was a fire I could not touch.

It arrived at our house one summer evening, handed off to me by my in-laws. I stuck it in the garage, thinking that if I ignored it, it would disappear. With each passing day, it became buried under a thin layer of West Texas dust and the stuff of life—stray cups from the car, pool floats, my daughter’s viola. Months passed. Yet I could still see my father’s distinct handwriting peeking out, the thick black lines scrawled across the top in Sharpie: “GIVE TO CARRIE.”

Ten years had passed since I last spoke to my parents. But each time I walked by the box, I’d hold my breath—as though my father’s anger might bleed out of the letters of my name and back into my life.

There were things I longed to find in the box, like my treasured collection of Nancy Drew books, which I imagined arranging on my daughter’s shelves. But there was likely a darker inheritance lurking inside too, so I put off unpacking it.

Across the US today, there are maybe 68 million boxes like mine hiding in garages—one for each of the 1 in 4 Americans who reports being estranged from a relative. The estrangement between my parents and me is the most difficult kind to reconcile: the kind rising out of trauma, abusive parenting, and mental illness in the family system.

The outside world may look at my situation and say that I had every right to walk away. Others, like my parents, think estrangement is never the answer. But I have spent more than a decade somewhere in between, asking myself how I can remain a faithful follower of Jesus while denying my parents access to my life. I am convinced that cutting off ties was my only escape hatch, but my desire to follow Jesus keeps me wrestling with persisting questions of obedience and grace.

How can I honor my father and mother if I refuse to see them? If I say I take Jesus’ teachings on forgiveness and reconciliation seriously, does being estranged mean I’m a hypocrite—bitter and unforgiving?

I am both estranged from my parents and alarmed by the casual way the topic is discussed in Western culture today.

“It’s better to become an orphan than remain a hostage” is a catch-phrase of licensed therapist Patrick Teahan, who has built a successful career around supporting those who decide to cut off their families. Going “no contact” with parents and relatives, what one New Yorker article calls “the process by which family members become strangers to one another,” is normalized in some circles.

Teahan’s advice on writing a no-contact letter epitomizes our current cultural stance toward estrangement: “Short, to the point. Don’t tell them why. ‘You’re toxic’ is all you need to say.”

Cultural observers worry that, in particular, estrangements caused by significant differences in core values, like political convictions, are experiencing an uptick. As our society grows more polarized, especially in brutal election seasons, advice like Teahan’s is becoming increasingly acceptable. But what are we left with when we cut the ties that bind?

After ten heartbreaking Thanksgivings, here’s what I have learned: Empty chairs always take up the most space. Empty chairs always shout the loudest.

One day on the social platform X, I read the story of James Merritt and his son Jonathan. By contemporary American cultural standards, there’s every reason for them to be estranged. Jonathan is a self-described “progressive gay man” living in New York City and writing about faith and culture. James is a pastor and the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention; he describes himself as “to the right of Ronald Reagan.” And yet, according to the post, the two “maintain a close relationship.” Intrigued, I messaged Jonathan, and we set up a time to talk with his father.

I learned that after Jonathan’s homosexuality was made public in 2012, forging a new relational path forward wasn’t easy for either of them. Jonathan, in particular, understood well the enticing pull to sever relationships with those with whom we disagree. Cutting off a primary relationship due to disagreements—even profound ones—might feel like it will reduce one’s emotional distress, Jonathan said, but it’s only sending conflict underground, where it “gets exported to other relationships, which start to suffer.”

Jonathan’s mentors helped him process his pain and discern that his father’s disagreements with him were not a rejection of him. Meanwhile, James refused to go after his son publicly over views opposed to his own, even when his silence made other people angry.

In spite of their differences, the two Merritts have been able to stay in relationship because they both subscribe to the same principle: It is almost impossible to love someone if you are consumed with trying to change them.

“The bottom line is this: When we stand before the Lord, each one of us is going to give an account for his own heart and his own life,” James said. “I can’t change Jonathan even if I wanted to, and vice versa is true too. … That’s God’s job.”

James and Jonathan are not cut off from each other the way I am from my parents, and talking to the father and son left me longing for my relationship to look more like theirs. But our conversation also helped me understand that the Merritts and I, estranged or not, have come to know how very little is within our control.

“Can we please clean out the garage?” my husband finally asked last fall, after we’d stepped around the box for at least six months.

So, one afternoon when the house was empty, I unpacked it. Sitting on the dusty floor, I sifted artifacts from my childhood into piles around me: pictures of first crushes, favorite teachers, and cousins at Christmas; my high school graduation cap; stuffed animals; countless trinkets whose importance had been lost to the decades.

Ten years ago, on the day of my sister-in-law’s baptism, I watched my parents walk out of the church and to their car. I didn’t know it was goodbye; I only knew I couldn’t bear to see them the next day. I never dreamed that I’d stack day upon day until I’d built a life apart from them, with little more than the contents of a box to prove I’d once lived as their daughter.

Leading up to that Sunday, I’d done everything I could to find a different way. I navigated every encounter like a game of chess, plotting three moves ahead, attempting to keep us far from the terrifying terrain of my father’s unmanaged, self-treated mental illness, with its delusions and increasing unpredictability.

I chose alcohol-free restaurants, keenly aware of how booze unleashed my alcoholic father’s poisonous tongue. I listed out safe conversation topics in advance—the weather, funny things the kids did, a recipe I tried and liked—keeping a wide berth around the minefields of politics and theology. But every encounter, at best, left my father mollified, my mother pretending all was okay, and me anxious and knotted up.

It worked until it didn’t. That Sunday afternoon, my plotting failed. I was in checkmate, clutching the hand of my toddler as I realized that no matter how I contorted myself, it was never going to be enough. Decades of manipulation and verbal abuse had proven my father had room in his life for only one version of me, fashioned in his own image, faded and blurred until I existed only as a reflection of his own thoughts and beliefs.

As I listened to a fresh round of his accusations, blame, and defensiveness, the truth settled over me with clarity: He would never stop trying to control my every thought, and I, if I remained, would never stop trying to manage our every interaction.

In the aftermath of my decision, I learned there are few people who understand that you can love someone and still walk away—and even fewer people in the church. Even my most supportive friends and family weren’t quite sure how to support me through this sort of loss. Their confusion echoed my own: Was my sadness evidence that I’d made a grave mistake?

When my parents sold and cleaned out my childhood home, they sent me the box. In the garage that afternoon, a wave of grief hit me as I neared the bottom. The Nancy Drew books weren’t there. I pictured myself, ten years old, all knees and elbows, lying on the floor of my bedroom as I disappeared into a world where mystery, fear, and uncertainty were safely resolved by the last chapter.

I reached for the final item in the box: a blue Bible with a tattered cover. See, it wasn’t all terrible, I reminded myself. I could still picture the day Brother Eddie at First Baptist Church in White Deer, Texas, placed it in my hands on the occasion of my baptism.

Was I seven or eight years old? I opened the cover to search for a date and was caught off guard by a new message, scrawled in my father’s heavy hand: “If God does call you into the kingdom in this life, you will start living the fifth commandment and repent and call your mother!”

Shame—estrangement’s close friend—rose up like bile in my throat. You are a terribly cruel daughter. And just like that, the inheritance of my life blackened, turned to ashes by my father’s words.

In the early years of my estrangement, I’d sometimes wake up at night panicked, dreaming I had lost my parents in a crowded street, an endless forest, or a stormy sea. Even now, I feel the visceral heaviness of their absence, like a phantom pain. At Christmas, I imagine my parents sitting in their home, bereft of grandchildren, our memories as an extended family permanently stunted.

But I cannot go back to the way things were. It is as simple and as infinitely complex as that. And it has taken me a long time to accept that God’s grace covers this too, for he is no stranger to messy families.

The Bible itself is full of estrangement stories. Esau, enraged by his father’s favoritism and his brother’s trickery, vows to kill Jacob (Gen. 27). Absalom, David’s favorite son, is driven into banishment (2 Sam. 13). The prodigal son, in Jesus’ well-known parable, takes his father’s wealth and disappears (Luke 15).

In other parts of the Gospels, Jesus speaks about human relationships plagued not just by rank sin and selfish ambition but by disordered loves and misplaced priorities. He tells his followers to let the dead bury their dead (Luke 9:60) and redraws the boundary lines of family around those who do his will (Matt. 12:48–50). These are difficult teachings that reiterate the importance of letting nothing come between us and Christ—not even our families or communities.

These biblical examples show that estrangement is not only a cutting off but also a letting go. One person gives up control over the actions and life choices of the other. Jacob flees; David turns away and weeps; the father hands over the inheritance and waits. And over and over again, the letting go in Scripture comes with a promise: Even when family ties are severed, God does not cut off his care.

The two ways our society tends to deal with ruptured relationships pale when we take God’s care out of the picture.

If the box in my garage is a metaphor for the process of estrangement, some people take the whole of it to the dumpster. This is the wisdom of the contemporary age: Everything is disposable and replaceable—especially people whose views rub us the wrong way—and life’s purpose is to “live your truth” with a mantra of “you do you.”

Others go to the opposite extreme. We take the whole box into the heart of our home and unpack it there. “Forgive and forget,” we tell ourselves, even while cutting our fingers on fractured vases. In many churches, people are told that the proper response to strife is either to ignore it or to reconcile at all costs. But sometimes it’s more complicated than that.

The Bible’s take on estrangement offers a third way for those of us living with severed relationships, one that neither gives in to the pull toward easy estrangement in an age of contempt nor allows the false, uneasy peace of pretending nothing is wrong.

Instead, the gospel equips us to navigate the complicated landscape of broken human relationships. It teaches us to seek biblical reconciliation with the long view in mind. Like the prodigal’s father, we learn to watch the horizon for signs of restoration and return. Like Moses, far from his Egyptian family and shunned by the Israelites, we wait in the wilderness as the unapproachable fire becomes holy ground.

In my garage that day, sitting with my defaced childhood Bible in my lap, the sharp edges of my father’s handwriting were suddenly softened by the tenderness of my heavenly Father’s voice: You are my beloved child, and you are already part of my kingdom.

It was up to God to intervene in their lives, not me. His only request for me was to let go of them and cling to his hand.

This side of Eden, human family systems can be dangerous and dishonoring. Estrangement can be a necessary step because to remain embedded in such families is a degradation of the imago Dei present in each of us. God does not delight in our suffering or our abuse.

Even less corrosive situations, like stark differences in political views, can expand into insurmountable relational rifts. Sometimes difficult choices must be made. But choose estrangement carefully, knowing its costs, only after every other avenue has been tried. Ten years on this path has taught me the road is rocky and difficult—you will not emerge without a limp.

“If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone,” the apostle Paul wrote in Romans 12:18. “As far as it depends on you” calls us to radical humility, forgiveness, and forbearance, but it also calls us to honesty.

There are relational circumstances—choices made by other fallen humans—that remain outside our influence, no matter how much we long otherwise. There are limits to how far our imperfect love can go, walls beyond which we cannot see. In such moments, Romans 12:18 makes way for us to say, “This is as far as I can go,” looking to the one who can take things from there.

Not every fraught relationship can be like James and Jonathan Merritt’s; some will end like mine. Yet even here in the wilderness of estrangement, there are valuable gifts.

In the absence of my parents, I have found Christian community that has been my surrogate family these last ten years. I have found wisdom and counsel in spiritual shepherds who have helped me discern my way forward. I have leaned on the love of my husband, friends, and extended family, who remind me of my worth even when I cannot see it myself. God has been constantly present in every big and small moment of my grief, restoring my identity in him, tenderly healing my wounds.

The enemy wants me to see my childhood Bible as a symbol of bitterness, grief, and fracturing—to wear it, and all that it represents, like a shackle around my neck. But I, like Joseph, can instead say, What was intended to harm me is being used for good (Gen. 50:20). What was meant to wound me now instead trains my eyes toward the horizon, and I long for my parents to experience the same grace.

That Bible is now on a shelf in my house—not the inheritance I imagined, but a good and beautiful one nonetheless.

Carrie McKean is a West Texas–based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Texas Monthly magazine.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Unboxing Estrangement".

- More from Carrie McKean

News

Recovery Ministries Help Portland Get Clean

Maria Baer in Portland

After an attempt to decriminalize drugs made the addiction crisis in Oregon even worse, local Christians are pleading with the sick—and the state—to let them help.

Jordan Gale

The litter in Portland is different. Every city has its share of trash, food wrappers, and cigarette butts ground into the sidewalks. But in Portland, particularly in Old Town just west of the Burnside Bridge, the trash is clothing. A wet shirt, crumpled on the street. A trail of grimy socks and underwear at the bus stop.

This is the epicenter of Oregon’s addiction crisis, where drug overdoses have quadrupled in the past five years. More than 3,500 people have died from overdoses in the state since 2020. That was the year voters overwhelmingly approved Measure 110, a law decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of hard drugs like heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine. Supporters believed it would neutralize an unfair stigma around drug addiction and reduce over-incarceration.

After nearly three years of spiking overdose rates, state lawmakers recently reversed course. Health officials, however, said they expect the number of overdose deaths to keep growing. Decriminalization didn’t encourage more people into recovery, and it didn’t improve Oregon’s addiction recovery infrastructure. In fact, many Christian recovery programs saw a drop in the number of people seeking their help.

Why didn’t decriminalization work? What can be done now, with overdose deaths rising?

After the state enacted a bill to recriminalize hard drug possession in September, ministry leaders in Portland are asking these questions and hoping the government will let them be a part of the solution.

When I visited Portland earlier this year, drug recriminalization had yet to take effect. I watched a man on the sidewalk light up methamphetamine in a glass tube in the middle of the afternoon. Others smoked what sources told me was likely fentanyl out of aluminum foil.

During the decriminalization under Measure 110, Oregonians caught with these substances could either accept a $100 citation or call a state-run hotline designed to connect them to recovery resources. They didn’t have to follow through with recovery to avoid the fine.

By late 2023, police had stopped issuing the citations, which proved unenforceable. Among the roughly 8,700 tickets they issued over three years, only 300 people cited ever called the recovery hotline. There’s no data tracking whether any of them ultimately sought treatment.

“Our streets went from typical Portland to a disaster almost overnight,” said Lance Orton, executive director of CityTeam, a ministry to people struggling with addiction and homelessness downtown. “We just started seeing overdoses like crazy.”

Orton said Portlanders began carrying around Narcan (a brand name of naloxone), a nasal spray that can counteract an overdose, in case they came upon someone who needed reviving. Open drug use skyrocketed, he said, and people who’d heard drugs were now legal in Oregon began moving in from out of state. Measure 110 was successful in one regard: The social stigma against hard drugs was disappearing.

Jordan Gale

First responders check a man’s vitals after he received Narcan to counteract a suspected fentanyl overdose in Portland.

While the latest national figures show that the overall uptick in drug deaths is finally beginning to reverse course, Oregon remains an exception to the trend. Overdose deaths in the state were up 22 percent last year.

When Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek signed the bill to recriminalize drugs last April, she said Measure 110 failed because it was underfunded and badly implemented. It was also poorly timed, right around the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and during massive protests over the death of George Floyd. That same year, fentanyl—a cheap, synthetic opioid that the Centers for Disease Control says is 50 times more potent than heroin—was just reaching the streets of Oregon.

Officials blamed a lack of recovery and treatment options. A state report released this year cited a shortage of 3,000 beds. But ministry leaders say at least a few hundred recovery beds aren’t included in the state’s official tally: the ones housed in their own ministries.

Union Gospel Mission (UGM), a homeless shelter and addiction recovery ministry located in Portland’s Old Town, houses up to 40 men in its residential substance-use recovery program. Within a two-mile radius are three others: the Catholic-founded Blanchet House (50 beds) as well as two other Protestant ministries, CityTeam (64 beds) and Portland Rescue Mission (42 beds). Separate locations house additional women in recovery.

Some of these groups’ leaders have gone through recovery themselves. They can attest to how important it can be for recovery to include spiritual components such as Bible studies and Christian fellowship. But these religious requirements have made them hesitant to apply for state licensure—they don’t want strings attached to their work—which means the state doesn’t count their vacancies in its official tally of available beds.

As the state’s addiction crisis worsens, that may be changing.

In an old, slanted building on Portland’s East Side, a group of men sit at rows of long tables and read from open workbooks in a makeshift classroom. Some are clearly more into the discussion than others. A few ceiling fans feebly push around the musty air.

The group has come across a word they don’t recognize and are debating its meaning: hedonism.

“Is that like Hinduism?” one guy says. Someone else asks Siri. “The philosophy that pleasure is the highest good and the proper aim of human life,” he reads from the response. “It’s like, self-gratifying conduct.”

Jordan Gale

An encampment near Portland’s downtown waterfront is commonly referred to as “The Pit.”

This is CityTeam’s apologetics class, where roughly 40 residents at the center are studying biblical philosophy and the neuroscience of addiction. They’re using a Christian addiction recovery curriculum called The Genesis Process.

Roughly 90 percent of the men here came from the court system. They call it being “on paper”: Most of the guys have long rap sheets, reflecting a revolving door of handcuffs, county jail stays, detox facilities, and then returns to the street until a judge finally threatens serious prison time if they don’t commit to a recovery program.

Orton and the leaders at fellow recovery ministries say the prospect of prison time is often a key motivator to get clean—a motivator Measure 110 removed. “So that deterrent, the stick in the whole carrot-and-stick thing, is important,” Orton said. “Because it does drive people to recovery, even if they don’t know that they want it yet.”

Advocates for decriminalizing hard drugs argued that it was unethical and inhumane to punish people for addiction, a mental health issue. Their presumption was that everyone battling addiction wants to get clean but can’t access the treatment they need.

Orton sees it differently. Even if you believe addiction is a mental health problem and you recognize the state doesn’t have enough treatment options, “criminalizing the actual substances is very different from criminalizing addiction itself,” he said.

When Orton first came to CityTeam in 2018, he wasn’t looking for a job; he was looking for a bed. He was addicted to heroin, and the car he was living in had just been stolen. He detoxed over several weeks, sleeping on a mat on CityTeam’s first floor, which transforms into an emergency shelter every night.

“I wanted to die,” he said. “You’re feeling pins and needles, you’re freezing cold yet sweating hot at the same time, there’s a complete reversal of all your bodily functions … it’s really not a pretty sight.”

Jordan Gale

A man constructed a shelter for himself off an Interstate 84 entrance ramp in Portland.

He said it was the most emotionally and physically painful experience of his life.

Just as Paul lamented, “I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing” (Rom. 7:19), many Christians working in recovery understand it’s possible to want to get clean but not want it badly enough to seek treatment.

Anyone who has been in the throes of addiction knows that the physical and mental pull often doesn’t leave space for rational decision-making. And while having treatment options available is critical, it’s not all that’s needed.

Jake Becker is a 32-year-old CityTeam resident with a boyish face and a chinstrap beard. He tells me he came here six months ago after he attempted suicide in a dark bathroom and somehow woke up from his overdose.

He’d sought treatment before but didn’t stick it out. After Becker’s 20th arrest, when a judge told him he could either go into treatment or face serious prison time, he came to CityTeam.

Orton says he used to be skeptical that men like Becker, “forced” into recovery by the courts, could really find sobriety—or Jesus. “I was like, Gosh, I don’t want a whole bunch of people in this house, culturally, just trying to avoid a prison sentence,” he says. “I was so wrong about that, because those people that come here … they see the culture of those that found the Lord here … and that jailhouse mentality quickly changes to Wow, I want some of that.”

Whether or not people enter recovery to avoid incarceration, most addiction recovery experts acknowledge the need for people struggling to get clean to surrender their self-will. It’s why 12-step programs famously encourage belief in a higher power—and why many Christian recovery ministries say the Bible is central to their work.

People “need a really healthy, clean, and sober community with a spiritual component, and without that, it’s a revolving door,” says Paul Schramm, aftercare director at Union Gospel Mission.

But adding Bible studies, church services, and a Christian “culture” doesn’t necessarily make recovery easier. After his suicide attempt, which he believes was thwarted by God, Becker says he knew he wanted a Christian recovery program.

Still, he balked when he walked through the doors at CityTeam. Here, the men bunk two to a room in small dorms with creaking floors. They share a communal bathroom. “I was just like, What did I get myself into?” Becker says.

Life at CityTeam is rigid. The men have appointed mealtimes, during which a rotating group serves the food to each other. They have Bible study and apologetics classes. They take a financial literacy course. They have chores. For the first several weeks, they can only go out with an escort. In keeping with the recovery adage that those who want to get clean must surrender the “people, places, and things” that filled their former lives, CityTeam doesn’t allow cellphones.

The leaders here, and at UGM, say the structure of their programs probably scares some people away. But it’s also what they believe makes their programs work.

At lunch and dinner, CityTeam opens its front doors to anyone who’s hungry. A line of tired people, with their shopping carts and their sleeping bags and usually their drugs, starts forming every day on the sidewalk about an hour before each mealtime.

For CityTeam, it’s an act of compassion. It’s also akin to marketing. “We see the same people every day, and they all know about the program we have here,” Becker says. “A lot of them just choose to come in and get their meal services, because at the end of the day, the easiest thing for me or anybody in this facility to do is to just walk out that door. It’s easier to live without the structure. It’s easier to live free and do what we want.”

It’s easier in part, he says, because Oregon has made it easier. Zack King, also a resident in CityTeam’s recovery program, says that with all the free resources for Oregon’s homeless population, it’s possible to live in relative comfort and support a drug habit simply by recycling aluminum cans.

“But we know what the tradeoff is,” Becker says. “And the tradeoff is misery.”

Recovery Ministries Help Portland Get Clean

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Oregon’s speaker of the House of Representatives, Dan Rayfield, talks about his mother’s past with addiction during the state legislative session in Salem, Oregon, last February.

Jordan Gale

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The Central City Concern outreach team distributes Narcan in the Old Town district of Portland.

Jordan Gale

In the Old Town neighborhood, I come across workers in bright yellow vests huddled near a doorway on a Saturday afternoon. In the doorway is a blanket with two socked feet poking out and a woman moaning beneath it. The workers have a wheelchair, but they don’t seem to know how to get her into it.

This is the Portland Street Response team. The city program, launched in 2021, sends behavioral health workers rather than police officers to address “mental or behavioral health” crises suffered by people living on the streets.

Oregon has the third-highest rate of homelessness in the US. Every state saw an increase after the pandemic, but Oregon’s rise was one of the sharpest. In Portland, homelessness jumped 20 percent in 2023 alone.

The vast majority of the homeless people in Oregon are struggling with addiction. Some local leaders believe the state’s plenitude of services has exacerbated that problem.

Union Gospel Mission operates a five-story building with tall windows that sits squarely in the middle of Old Town. Like Portland Rescue Mission across the street, it serves free meals in a first-floor cafeteria every day. The men in its two-year LifeChange recovery program live on the third floor.

Clint Sams, director of LifeChange, says for a few months during the pandemic, he could barely navigate the streets to work. “All of a sudden, there were tents everywhere,” he says. “You had to walk on the street because the city just fell apart.”

The UGM team says Measure 110’s impact on the ministry was less about the loss of the legal “stick” to motivate recovery. Instead, it destigmatized drug use at the same time as the increase in government services made it easier to live on the streets.

“Talk to 100 people on the streets … 99 percent of them are going to say food is not a problem,” Schramm says. “The vast majority of people know exactly how to get food, how to get clothing, how to get drugs, how to get shelter, how to get cigarettes… . They can have all this stuff accessible to them and they don’t have to get clean and sober, so why would they?”

In all, 354 nonprofits currently serve Portland’s homeless population, according to Orton at CityTeam. Along with the daily meals, free showers, and emergency nightly shelter beds, those living on the street have an open invitation to gather under the Burnside Bridge every Thursday night for NightStrike, a decades-old city initiative that was taken over by CityTeam a couple years ago.

At NightStrike, visitors mill around various stations set up on plastic tables. They can find food, coffee, and pet food. They can get a haircut, get their feet washed, choose a novel from a collection of donated books, and shop for clothes at a pop-up makeshift closet. The point isn’t to proselytize recovery; it’s to offer help, to build trust, and to communicate that CityTeam is here and ready—when they’re ready.

I meet Patricio at a table during NightStrike. He is eating a paper-plateful of macaroni and cheese as the sun slowly sets over the Willamette River.

It’s loud, someone is playing music, and Patricio speaks low and fast. He leans in to ask me if I can tell that he’s high on meth. He grins when I say no. It’s hard to follow Patricio’s scattered conversation, but he tells me he’s been living on the streets for decades. He sleeps in a tent, given to him by Multnomah County Services. But he recently qualified for Oregon’s Permanent Supportive Housing program, so he’s on the waitlist for a free apartment, for which the state will pay his rent indefinitely. He’ll be under no requirement to stay clean.

Ten minutes into my conversation with Patricio, I feel bold enough to ask, “Don’t you want to get clean?” He tried it before, he says, but relapsed. He’s 50 years old, diabetic, and figures he’s going to die soon anyway. I press further: Wouldn’t he like to work and buy his own things? He points to the new shoes he just picked up at the pop-up clothing station. “I can just get clothes here,” he says.

Orton, CityTeam’s director, says he wrestles with the tension between helping and enabling, between meeting people’s immediate needs and changing people’s lives. A woman moaning under a blanket needs a wheelchair, and probably more, right now. Jesus modeled compassion to the needy often by meeting their physical needs as well as their spiritual hunger.

“It’s compassionate, I get that,” Orton says. “But what if that means they can spend one more night on the street getting drugs and getting high and they die? … The real hard part as a Christian is to say, ‘Okay, we’re here when you’re ready.’”

Union Gospel Mission used to have a strong relationship with local officials. Over 35 years in ministry, Sams had cultivated relationships with several local judges, who would often redirect drug offenders to LifeChange instead of prison. But in recent decades, the relationship between Portland’s faith-based recovery community and government officials has chilled.

The county recently awarded CityTeam a $400,000 one-time grant to purchase a new building for its women’s residential recovery program. Even when the county or city does set aside funds for addiction recovery efforts, leaders say they’ve been wary of applying for grants for ongoing support from Oregon’s progressive government. They’re afraid they might be asked to drop the Christian commitments they believe help make their programs effective. And the government seems wary of partnering with Christian groups. I heard from the Oregon Health Authority a few times for this story, but when I asked whether the state might consider working with Christian recovery centers, they stopped responding.

Jordan Gale

Friends embrace after the death of a mutual acquaintance on NE 82nd Avenue in Portland.

“We’re not counted,” says Schramm at UGM, who adds that even leaders at a recent neighborhood association meeting were shocked to learn that his ministry and others had open beds. “We’re not only not counted as in we’re not considered a solution to the problem; we’re not counted literally. Our beds are not counted as available.”

While Oregon’s new drug law, HB 4002, reinstates drug possession as a criminal misdemeanor, it also encourages law enforcement to consider “deflection” in lieu of arresting or incarcerating someone caught with drugs. Each county must decide whether to offer deflection and, if so, to design and implement its own version of it.

In Portland’s Multnomah County, Matt Stein says county leaders are planning to open “drop-off centers,” hubs where police can bring suspected drug offenders who may then be sent to a detox center, a hospital, a recovery program, or jail. Stein has lobbied to include faith-based recovery programs as an option at these drop-off centers.

Christians have also made inroads with Multnomah County’s homelessness task force. Imago Dei, a nondenominational church on Portland’s east side, sends a staff member to its meetings and opens its building for a county-operated warming shelter. On a hill near the church, a slew of tents are set up beside a painted sign that reads “Stop the Sweeps” in opposition to the police practice of forcibly removing homeless camps. With the US Supreme Court decision allowing local governments to regulate camping on public property, the “sweeps” are likely to continue.

Inside Imago Dei, there are few reminders of the city’s crisis. The congregation skews young and diverse in age and ethnicity. Pastor Seth King says church members routinely volunteer with CityTeam and the congregation hears about “marginalized groups from the pulpit every week.”

The church also has a budget line item that most churches don’t: broken window repair. “Every couple months, we have a broken window,” King says. “But when we moved to this location, we knew where we were moving … . We’re a church that’s very much here on purpose and wants to stay here on purpose.”

Nearly every person I interview in Portland eventually asks me if the city is as bad as I expected, as bad as the national news reports say. They want to hear that it’s better than I thought. They want to believe it’s better than it used to be.

I say no, it’s not as bad, and I’m mostly telling the truth. The bridges and gardens and mountains are beautiful. The people I’ve met are patient and kind, and they’re still worried for their city, which means they still have hope.

Stein, who works at UGM, says his motivation to help grows as he gets to know more people in the recovery program. Watching and praying alongside men and women as they struggle against their addictions make the sweeping generalizations about drug users seem fatally shallow. “You start to see … this is Neil. This is Cody,” he says.

When Jesus met the woman at the well and offered her “living water,” she ran back to her neighbors with a non sequitur: “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did” (John 4:29). Her shock wasn’t just that she may have met the Jewish Messiah. It was also that Jesus had known her.

Addiction recovery and medical detox centers are all over Portland. But the programs run by Christians work to really know the people to whom they are ministering. It takes longer, and it’s harder. But they believe—for each man and woman living on sidewalks, sleeping in tents, eating under bridges, brushing their teeth over paper bags—it is what’s required.

Maria Baer is a reporter based in Columbus, Ohio.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Oregon’s Relapse".

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Books

Review

New & Noteworthy Books

Matt Reynolds

Chosen by Matt Reynolds, CT senior books editor.

Illustrations by Tara Anand

The Crisis of Civil Law: What the Bible Teaches about Law and What It Means Today

Benjamin B. Saunders (Lexham Press)

Across the Western world, the concept of law is highly contested. What makes the law worthy of respect? How do we apply it without corruption or favoritism? Christians, whose own divisions on law and politics often mirror those in surrounding society, approach these questions with added burdens, argues Australian law professor Benjamin B. Saunders. They know, for instance, that secular laws can conflict with Christian morality or, in extreme cases, be wielded as tools of persecution. Moreover, they know they answer to a higher law. In The Crisis of Civil Law, Saunders clarifies the thorny relationship between rival decrees of God and earthly governments.

Waiting Isn’t a Waste: The Surprising Comfort of Trusting God in the Uncertainties of Life

Mark Vroegop (Crossway)

Some forms of waiting look like nothing more than minor inconveniences: a jammed-up highway, for instance, or a slow-moving checkout lane. Other forms are weightier, such as extended seasons of sorrow, pain, relational rupture, or existential despair. In all these cases, waiting can test our patience and steal our joy. In his book Waiting Isn’t a Waste, pastor and author Mark Vroegop asks how we can experience life’s numerous “gaps” as occasions for trusting in God’s fatherly care rather than marinating in frustration or futility. As he affirms, “Waiting on God is living on what I know to be true about God when I don’t know what’s true about my life.”

When the Church Harms God’s People: Becoming Faith Communities That Resist Abuse, Pursue Truth, and Care for the Wounded

Diane Langberg (Brazos Press)

As a psychologist, Diane Langberg has done extensive counseling with trauma survivors, many of whom suffered under abusive church leaders. In her latest book, When the Church Harms God’s People, Langberg distills lessons from her long career, examining why churches promote and protect predatory figures. She also explores how local congregations can reform their cultures to better ensure safe, flourishing flocks. Writing of her love for the church, Langberg notes that God “has entrusted his lambs to shepherds who would guard them well… The church is to be a place where sheep can safely graze. To fail the sheep is to fail our Lord.”

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "New & Noteworthy".

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Books

Review

Tending and Keeping the Christian Past in an ‘Ahistoric Age’

Christopher Gehrz

Why the work of historical stewardship isn’t just for historians.

Illustration by Tim Bouckley

You may have heard this story before: While studying the past at Oxford, an atheist scholar converts to Christianity.

But this isn’t the story of C. S. Lewis. This is the tale of Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, an Australian historian who was appointed as a research fellow at Oxford after earning her doctorate at Cambridge. There, she experienced “a discomforting realisation,” as she recalls in her new book, Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age. “Every achievement merely landed me at the bottom of another ladder.”

Lacking “a larger narrative that might give me a normative vision of human flourishing, a transcendent grounding for morality, or even a means of addressing life’s ultimate concerns,” Irving-Stonebraker began to read theology and attend church as her academic career continued. While teaching in Florida, she observed Christians take Communion one Sunday morning to the sounds of a hymn whose “words and music took me out of Tallahassee, out of myself, and into a much larger story. . . . There seemed to be a purpose to human history and to time, after all.”

Her conversion overcame not only an atheistic worldview but also a larger sense of living “an ahistorical life.” Though she studied the past professionally, she hadn’t learned to see herself “as a part of any enduring historical communities that might help frame a deeper purpose for my life.” Instead, she had been formed by what she calls the “Ahistoric Age,” whose residents are unwilling to “think of ourselves as historical beings” and are virtually unable “to engage meaningfully with the past.”

As Irving-Stonebraker observes, becoming a Christian offered her “the ultimate story about a God who . . . pursued us by inhabiting time,” a story that “seemed to make sense of human history.” But it also carried a divine calling: “to tend and keep time, including the past. In short, we are to be a witness to the past, cultivate it, and keep uncovering the stories and ideas that comprise the history of the world.”

Tending the past (“uncovering the historical stories of people sometimes overlooked, bringing historical injustices to light, and recognising the sins of the past, including our own,” as Irving-Stonebraker puts it) and keeping it (“protecting and passing down historical knowledge and our heritage as Christians”) is not just the work of historians. Irving-Stonebraker describes stewardship of the past as the responsibility of all members of God’s common priesthood—which is to say, all believers.

This requires a broader definition of “history” than academic historians may find comfortable, but she suggests specific ways that professors, pastors, and parents alike can tend and keep the past.

Irving-Stonebraker brings to her book the skills of a gifted scholar. Her seamless integration of examples from history, theology, and literature testifies to the many ways that stewarding the past can further intellectual formation. Her particular studies in the history of science inform her larger project. In one instance, she cites Robert Boyle, a 17th-century Irish chemistry pioneer, whose notion of the scientist as “priest of nature” inspires her conception of Christians as “priests of history.” And her research into Francis Bacon’s views on colonial expansion illustrates how we can avoid reducing history to “ideological simplicity.”

Irving-Stonebraker is at her best when sharing stories—not just those of long-dead scientists and theologians but those of family and friends practicing stewardship of the past today. Hearing from someone with her background, an Australian Anglican who studies early modern Europe, broadens our view of the Christian story and reminds American readers that theirs is not the only nation that struggles with its complicated past.

Moreover, such anecdotes underscore Irving-Stonebraker’s argument that “we embed our identity in stories.” To postmodern people who feel adrift from the currents of history, storytelling about the past offers a powerful way to understand who we are—and whose we are.

Alas, Irving-Stonebraker waits until the very last pages of Priests of History to fully tell her best story: that of her own journey from atheism to Christianity. It was jarring, for one thing, to have the conversion narrative that began the book continue only in occasional snippets. Had she prioritized her story at the outset, Irving-Stonebraker could have given readers a more vivid impression of our modern alienation from history.

Instead, she opens with loud condemnations of a secular worldview that stresses creating our own identities by liberating ourselves from inherited traditions. If one problem with the Ahistoric Age is its tendency to reduce the past to sweeping generalizations, then the solution is not to make similarly unsubtle claims about the present. But Irving-Stonebraker falls into that trap when she issues broad-brush statements like this: “We believe that the past is merely a source of shame and oppression from which we must free ourselves. . . . We do not believe history has a narrative or a purpose.”

I don’t doubt that many people nowadays—as in previous eras—do find the past irrelevant, if they aren’t ignoring it altogether or looking at it through the lens of ideology. But early on in Priests of History, there’s far too little of the nuance, empathy, humility, and comfort with complexity that Irving-Stonebraker rightly associates with historical study at its finest.

Take, for instance, how she presents the global phenomenon of “protests about and tearing down of statues.” While Irving-Stonebraker acknowledges that these actions take place “against the backdrop of genuine injustices in the present, particularly the ongoing issues of racism,” she unfairly presents such protests as “a highly politicised approach to history in which people appear to care passionately about history’s symbols and what they represent” (italics mine).

The most famous example of this theme in the American context, debates over Confederate commemoration, is far more complicated. As historian Karen Cox has documented in her book No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice, “Lost Cause” memorials were themselves meant to impose a vision of white supremacy on African Americans who have protested such structures since they were erected. When activists promote counter-commemoration of the Civil Rights Movement—as when a bronze statue of John Lewis replaced a Confederate memorial in Decatur, Georgia, this summer—they are tending and keeping the past, not dismissing or distorting it.

Fortunately, most of the book’s later chapters warmed my historian’s heart. Here, Irving-Stonebraker strikes a good balance between revealing the problem of ahistoricism and pointing to its solution, showing how Christians can tell multifaceted stories of a complicated past. She shows, moreover, how to mine that past for religious practices that attest to our status as “historical beings” participating in God’s larger story of redemption.

While the overly broad claims of the book’s opening section left me wanting to make counterarguments and point out counterexamples, the more subtle details of the second and (especially) third sections convicted me of ways that I too am a historian living ahistorically.

But if Irving-Stonebraker’s critique of the Ahistoric Age is mostly persuasive, it’s also incomplete, leaving unexamined or underexamined two versions of ahistoricism that are particularly influential among some groups of Christians.

First, she doesn’t seem to realize the wide popularity of providential history within certain evangelical circles. Plenty of American believers are convinced that God has specially called and blessed the United States and continues to superintend its unfolding history.

This is certainly a way of finding identity in a story that claims transcendent meaning, but as many other Christian historians have long argued, such an interpretation of the past is deeply problematic on both historical and theological grounds.

Second, it’s dismaying that Irving-Stonebraker has so little to say about the ahistorical thinking that undergirds promises to “make America great again.” Perhaps this is less of a problem in Australia than it is in the US, but what CT editor in chief Russell Moore wrote in a 2016 New York Times piece remains true in 2024: “White American Christians who respond to cultural tumult with nostalgia . . . are blinding themselves to the injustices faced by their black and brown brothers and sisters in the supposedly idyllic Mayberry of white Christian America.”

To her credit, Irving-Stonebraker doesn’t want us to look at the past “through rose-tinted sentimentality.” Nor would she have us look away from “the horrific wrongs of history.” Chapter 7 introduces abolitionists like Mary Prince, Anne Hart Gilbert, and Elizabeth Hart Thwaites. And chapter 8 presents Frederick Douglass as “a model of how to engage with the sin of the past,” someone who called out the sources of injustice while holding out hope for redemption.

However, Irving-Stonebraker would rather celebrate Christian opposition to evils like white supremacy than examine Christian complicity in them. On balance, she spends far more time suggesting how Christians can keep or “guard” the past (holding to historic orthodoxy, retrieving past practices for discipleship, telling inspirational stories of Christian witness) than how they can tend it, which includes reckoning with noble and ignoble legacies alike.

Thankfully, many of today’s Christ-ian historians are modeling these virtues in their work. Sean McGever’s recent book Ownership, a nuanced account of slavery and 18th-century evangelicalism, is one example. Another is Malcolm Foley’s The Anti-Greed Gospel, an examination of “racial capitalism” due out in February 2025. So while I do recommend Priests of History as making a case for the Christian stewardship of the past, I would encourage readers to put Irving-Stonebraker’s writing in conversation with that of Christian historians more focused on tending to the parts of our past we might prefer to forget.

Christopher Gehrz is professor of history at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He writes about Christianity, history, and education at his Substack, The Pietist Schoolman.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Past Tense".

- More from Christopher Gehrz

Books

Review

The Black Church Has Five Theological Anchors

Claude Atcho

Walter Strickland’s sweeping narrative of African American Christianity portrays a big God who is strong to deliver.

Illustration by Diana Ejaita

Within evangelical circles, we are currently enjoying what might be called a “retrieval revival.” Many believers are working to retrieve parts of our Christian heritage for the sake of enjoying a richer relationship with God and a deeper fellowship with his people.

For some, this looks like rediscovering older traditions of liturgical worship. Others are reading books like John Mark Comer’s Practicing the Way, which introduces ancient spiritual formation practices to a new generation. And Christian publishers are pumping out titles about the value of early church and medieval theology for God’s people today.

When we give a fresh hearing to forgotten or silenced voices, we honor the past while expanding possibilities for the future. Just as the church is “always reforming,” as the Reformation adage says, there is a sense in which it should always be retrieving. These are shared synapses, meant to fire together.

In the American context, perhaps the most urgent work of retrieval relates to African American Christianity. Even many well-read believers—regardless of ethnicity—have too little knowledge of this tradition. African American Christianity is a significant story within the singular story of church history. When we lack familiarity with its contours, we know less of God’s faithfulness. In retrieving it, however, we allow it to reform our faith and practice.

This is part of the gift Walter R. Strickland II presents to readers in Swing Low, his massive new treatment of the Black church in America. Strickland’s groundbreaking book amplifies a story we have tended to ignore or, at best, grant a selective hearing to.

Strickland, a theology professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, unfolds his account over two volumes: one subtitled A History of Black Christianity in the United States and the other An Anthology of Black Christianity in the United States (which gathers a wealth of primary source writings). Taken together, the two volumes immerse readers in the grand narrative of the Black church experience, educating and edifying as they magnify the God who makes a way out of no way (Isa. 43:19).

Many writers and scholars have tackled the story of African American Christianity, taking a variety of approaches. Previous efforts have applied the lenses of historical survey (Paul Harvey’s Through the Story, Through the Night), denominational development (C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya’s The Black Church in the African American Experience), African and cultural origins (Albert J. Raboteau’s Slave Religion), and pastoral lament (Thabiti M. Anyabwile’s The Decline of African American Theology).

For its part, Swing Low takes a comprehensive approach, blending history, theology, and firsthand testimony from prominent Black church figures. Surveying events from 1619 to the present, Strickland proposes five theological “anchors” of Black Christianity—core commitments that “emerged from the nascent days of African American faith” and endure to this day.

The first anchor is “Big God.” As Strickland describes it, the Black church tradition stresses God’s sovereignty as Lord over all, emphasizing his capacity to “do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Eph. 3:20).

The second is “Jesus,” portrayed as the Man of Sorrows, friend of sinners, and Savior of the world. The suffering of Christ and the atoning power of his blood are vital to any understanding of Black Christian faith.

Third, Strickland notes the importance of “Conversion and Walking in the Spirit.” Here, he highlights Black Christianity’s early roots in the revivals of the First Great Awakening, which infused it with a passion for conversion and sanctification.

Fourth, Strickland highlights “The Good Book,” emphasizing the Bible’s centrality to Black faith, from its oral rehearsal in slave songs to the insistence on “telling the story” that pervades Black preaching.

Last, and crucially, Strickland cites the theme of “Deliverance.” This fifth anchor is rooted, he writes, in the fact that “God is a liberator.” Deliverance, Strickland argues, has a multifaceted meaning. The theme originates in the Old Testament, with Israel’s rescue from Egypt and the observance of Jubilee years, when slaves are freed and debts forgiven. But it reaches a climax in Christ’s atonement, which frees his people from sin and death and assures their victory in “God’s eschatological kingdom.”

Throughout Strickland’s narrative, the five anchors give readers handles by which to grasp, appreciate, and evaluate the trials and triumphs of Black faith in America. They offer a framework for seeing the development of this faith across historical eras, illustrating both where Black Christians speak with one voice and where elements of diversity remain.

As Strickland shows, various Black Christian leaders have sought to revise our understanding of certain anchors, prioritize one over the others, or integrate them in different ways. In one example, he argues that modern Black liberation theology reflects a desire to heighten themes of deliverance while departing from widely held conceptions of the role of Scripture and the work of Christ.

A picture emerges, then, of Black Christianity beginning mainly as a single trunk, from which various branches and limbs have grown in response to scholarly trends, the ravages of systematic racism, and major shifts in Black and American life. Swing Low is valuable for understanding, historically and intellectually, the “birth story” of Black Christianity and the beauty and diversity that marks its development. Even as that diversity, at times, stretches beyond the bounds of historic orthodoxy, Strickland commendably tells the full story, giving space to even dissenting writers in his anthology.

The African American Christian tradition is never merely intellectual. It is inherently celebratory and participatory, its doctrines culminating in praise and action. Likewise, Swing Low embodies the very theological tendencies it describes, which is perhaps its greatest strength. Beyond telling the story of African American Christianity, the book offers a vivid encounter with the Lord at its center. It radiates God’s faithfulness to his church, no matter the oppression or obstacles it faced.

In particular, Strickland’s narrative demonstrates the enduring witness and gift of Black faith on American soil. Early on, American colonists were frequently hesitant, if not outright unwilling, to evangelize Black slaves. One missionary, Francis Le Jau, insisted that slaves sign a pledge, wherein they promised not to “ask for holy baptism out of any design to free [themselves] … but merely for the good of [their souls].”

This form of Christianity, to borrow the language of Strickland’s fifth anchor, was purposefully devoid of deliverance. Out of this truncated gospel, however, African American Christians recovered the deliverance motif that runs through Scripture, setting “trajectories for African American Christianity that are evident among Black Christians today.” In refusing to accept a slaveholder’s gospel, Black believers cultivated a more biblical expression of Christian faith on American soil, one rooted in the love of God and neighbor. They advanced a gospel that touches body and soul.

In such ways, the advent of Black Christianity played a pivotal role in fusing orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxy (right practice). In a famed second-century apologetic for Christianity, the Epistle to Diognetus, the anonymous author states that “the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body.” Reading Strickland’s account, one can hardly help concluding that God, in his providence, appointed the Black church as a corrective conscience to its white counterpart—a cleansing ecclesial soul to a compromised ecclesial body.

As Strickland puts it, African American Christianity is not impressed with an orthodoxy severed from orthopraxy, for “the simple affirmation of biblical concepts is not the goal of a doctrinal statement.” Statements like these help explain why Swing Low covers the robust yet forgotten history of African American missions. Strickland highlights the neglected stories of Betsey Stockton (a missionary to Hawaii), John Marrant (who witnessed to Native Americans in the 1770s), and Lott Carey, “the first recorded American missionary to West Africa.” For these and like-minded figures, knowing the gospel meant doing something with it for the good of others.

The thematic throughline of Swing Low is Strickland’s portrait of African American Christians as “a determined people driven by faith to pursue spiritual and social uplift for themselves and others to God’s glory.” I found his account of this drive for spiritual and social uplift in the modern era (1969 and onward) particularly riveting.

Strickland wisely devotes multiple chapters to narrating the development of Black evangelical theology in response to racists, riots, and other 1960s-era tumult. He then offers multiple chapters recounting the development of modern Black liberation theology, which occurred along a similar timeline. Strickland’s meticulous yet concise retrieval introduces readers to overlooked figures like Tom Skinner, William Pannell, and William H. Bentley. Broadly speaking, these figures sought to free themselves “from uncritical dependence upon White evangelical theologians who would attempt to tell us what the content of our efforts at liberation should be.”

Movements like the National Black Evangelical Association worked to emphasize the anchor of deliverance, attempting to counter Black liberation theology with a socially conscious evangelical alternative. Strickland observes that this movement “started strong but did not persist,” in part because “many of its primary proponents were ministry practitioners, not academics.” Since academics can focus more attention on writing than ministers, Strickland observes, Black evangelical theology couldn’t produce a body of written work to compete with the Black liberationists.

As he ranges across the modern evangelical landscape, Strickland’s narration and analysis are trenchant—and painfully relevant. Readers see how efforts to seek distance from white evangelical institutions in the 1970s foreshadow more contemporary dynamics, such as those considered in a 2018 New York Times article titled “A Quiet Exodus: Why Black Believers Are Leaving White Evangelical Churches.”

I have only a few minor quibbles with Swing Low. Because Strickland’s occasional moments of prescriptive analysis are so insightful, readers might benefit from more of them, especially in the form of a longer concluding word or epilogue.

In the final chapter of volume 1, “Into the Twenty-First Century,” Strickland gives a brief assessment of where Black Christianity is headed. Strickland sees three major movements: “the anchored, conscious, and culturally liberated Christians,” “Black liberationists,” and “Black evangelicals.” The final chapter centers on the first group. As Strickland notes, believers in this category worship and serve in a range of church contexts, but they have largely broken away from white evangelicalism. Today, you can find them returning to Black churches or other ecclesial contexts that are “socially conscious and celebrate Black cultural expression,” even as they remain rooted in the five anchors.

Strickland briefly hypothesizes that this movement will develop in contrast to liberationists and “adjacent” to Black evangelicals. He suggests that “the major question for their future is not regarding doctrinal commitments,” but instead “where these believers will find their homes in terms of local churches, established Christian ministries, and institutions and church-planting movements.” This is fascinating terrain, and I’d like more of Strickland’s thoughts on it.

My other critique pertains to volume 2, Strickland’s anthology. It is, to be sure, remarkable in its depth and breadth, with genre headings that include “Sermons and Oratory,” “Theological Treatises,” “Worship and Liturgy,” and “Personal Correspondence and Autobiography.”

I was enthused to see such a wonderful range of voices and texts but surprised that Strickland omitted the fiery Jeremiah Wright sermon that caused campaign trouble for Barack Obama in 2008. Wright, Obama’s former pastor, sparked great controversy for his “God damn America” refrain decrying American militarism. For many American Christians, though, this sermon represented their first encounter with a certain strand of Black prophetic Christianity or liberation theology.

Missing as well are the contributions of African American Roman Catholics, whom the scholar Raboteau once called “a minority within the minority.” Strickland notes in the opening pages why Black Catholicism is beyond the scope of his project, but one can hope that his work will spur others to retrieve the story of Black belief in all its ecumenical dimensions.

These small constructive notes aside, Swing Low is poised to become a standard guide to the history of African American Christianity. Strickland has blessed the church with a thorough and much-needed work of retrieval. With this book’s inspiration, we can give ourselves more passionately to the reforming work of orthodoxy and orthopraxy for the spiritual and social uplift of all, to the glory of God.

Claude Atcho is pastor of Church of the Resurrection in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is the author of Reading Black Books: How African American Literature Can Make Our Faith More Whole and Just.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "The Black Church's Big God".

- More from Claude Atcho

Testimony

I Made Millions as a Porn Star. It Nearly Cost Me Everything.

Joshua Broome

My adult-film career destroyed my sense of self-worth, but God wouldn’t let it define me.

Photography by JerSean Golat for Christianity Today

I grew up in a South Carolina town of fewer than 3,000 people. My mother had me at age 16, and my father, also 16, lived in the same town, but he was conspicuously absent from my life.

In a small town like mine, it only took one person knowing one thing about your life for everyone to know that thing. And the thing people knew about me was that I was fatherless, even though my dad lived right down the street.

Despite this—or perhaps in some way because of it—I was driven to achieve, to make something of myself. My work ethic turned me into a great student, a standout athlete, and eventually a well-trained actor and model. This pursuit of “enough” was relentless, and before long, it landed me in Hollywood to pursue acting and modeling full-time.

Early in my career, I had an agent and was working with some regularity. But no amount of success could satisfy. After a few years in Hollywood, some women recruiting for the porn industry asked if I would be interested in doing a film.

For context, I was exposed to pornography at age 13. Having grown up without any example of healthy relationships between men and women, I quickly fell into consuming pornography and living a promiscuous lifestyle. Nine years later, when I was invited to enter the world I first encountered in magazines as a teenager, I had no good reason to refuse.

Photography by JerSean Golat for Christianity Today

That choice cost me more than I could have imagined. Soon after my first adult film, my mainstream agent stopped representing me. The sting of shattered dreams remained fresh when my mom learned about my first foray into pornography. I shudder to recall the humiliating conversation we had.

Despite my reservations about doing adult entertainment, I truly believed this was my only viable career path. Trapped in a downward spiral of shame, I allowed my initial bad choice to redefine my entire identity, convincing myself I was without options.

Six years later, I had starred in many award-winning films, and I’d even tried my hand at writing and directing porn. During that period, I pocketed millions of dollars. But no money, fame, or accolades could overcome the inferiority complex that stemmed from my father’s absence. If anything, my career success only amplified my anxiety and deepened my depression.

Early in 2013, I resolved to take my life. Before carrying it out, I wanted to hear someone confirm that I was as worthless and disgusting as I felt. So I walked into a bank to deposit a check from a porn film, hoping the teller would notice the memo on the check indicating where the money came from. On some level, I wanted the teller to gasp; it would give me permission to kill myself. It would seal my shame and self-loathing.

I also had not heard my real name uttered in over a year. In the porn industry, you typically choose a pseudonym to conceal your identity and suppress the shame associated with your line of work. So over the last six years, I’d deposited checks at ATMs or with mobile phone apps to avoid interacting with an actual person.

As I slid the check across the counter, I locked eyes with the teller and waited for a dismissive headshake, a judgmental under-the-breath muttering, or maybe, if I was lucky, an antagonistic remark made directly to my face. Instead, she said nothing until I was about to walk away. Then, as my eyes watered and I started shaking, she said, “Joshua, can I please help you? Joshua, are you okay?”

Her compassion pierced through my numbness, and my instinctive reaction was to run home, have a long cry, and call my mom. When my mom picked up the phone, she told me she loved me and I would always be her son. She begged me to leave the porn industry and come home. I moved back that very day.

Looking to make a fresh start, I got a job at a gym in Raleigh, North Carolina. For two years, I tried doing enough good to cover up my bad deeds to compensate for my feelings of worthlessness. I had great mentors and a community that cared about me as an individual. And even though my prior career in pornography surfaced before long—it was, after all, only an internet click away—I didn’t experience any rejection because of it.

One day, I met a beautiful, athletic, and incredibly smart but very reserved young lady whom I asked out on many dates. She turned me down at first but eventually agreed to go on a run with me. As I waited for her to arrive, I decided not to withhold my past from her. I told her that I was a former porn star and someone unwanted by his own father.

Her response changed my life. After pausing for what seemed like forever, she assured me that I was not defined by the worst thing I’d ever done—or by the greatest thing I would ever do. God, she told me, was the creator of heaven and earth and everyone on the earth—and he alone determines who you are.

She asked if I knew God. I told her I knew about God, but clearly I didn’t have the kind of personal relationship she enjoyed through Jesus. We walked and talked, and eventually she invited me to church.

I went along with her, believing I had no business there but also knowing I wanted to be wherever she was. On that day, I heard the gospel for the first time from an older Baptist pastor. Dressed in jeans and sporting tattoos on his arms, he shared his own imperfections, measuring them against the ultimate perfection of Jesus. He preached from 2 Samuel 9, where King David shows grace to a man named Mephibosheth, a grandson of Saul.

Mephibosheth, unable to walk after a childhood accident, wonders why the king would extend mercy to a “dead dog” like himself (v. 8). As I sat there, hearing about the grace of God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, I likewise wondered why God would show any favor to me, given all the wrongs I had done and how worthless I felt.

Then the pastor read Hebrews 12:2, which says how Jesus “endured the cross, scorning its shame” for the sake of “the joy set before him.” Right away, I understood why Jesus had given his life: because he loved sinners like me. In that moment, I surrendered my life to Christ, letting the blood he shed on the cross wash over my shame. I stood up weeping, knowing I was now a son of my Father in heaven.

My story gets better. That incredible woman, Hope, has been my wife for nearly a decade, and we have four incredible sons. What a joyous reversal from the day I thought would be my last, when I remember writing down the reasons I no longer wanted to live. I knew I wanted to become a father (to make up for my own father’s absence) and a husband (who could give someone the kind of love my father never gave my mother). And I thought my porn career had disqualified me from ever fulfilling these roles. Yet God stood ready to do abundantly more than I could have imagined.

And he continues to use me for his glory. After years of discipleship and a theological education from Liberty University, I have preached hundreds of sermons; given talks at events, universities, and conferences; and appeared on major podcasts. Currently, I serve as director of operations for a nonprofit called Momentum, which helps people find purpose and heal from sexual brokenness.

My story is an example of the grace of God that is available to all, no matter what you have done or what pain you have experienced. Because of what Jesus did on the cross, you can experience the healing, wholeness, and purpose he offers to anyone who will surrender their life to him.

Joshua Broome is the author of 7 Lies That Will Ruin Your Life: What My Journey from Porn Star to Preacher Taught Me About the Truth That Sets Us Free.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Testimony".

- More from Joshua Broome

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