The Gettys’ Modern Hymn Movement Has Theological Pull

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis in Nashville

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

Keith and Kristyn Getty.

Courtesy of Getty Music

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

News

Gen Z Protestants Want to Be Famous for Their Hobbies and Talents

Annie Meldrum and Isabel Ong

“It’s easier to say to someone [that] you’re good at singing or playing football than having a faith or engaging in church.”

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Unsplash

Gen Z Protestants don’t want to be known for their faith.

Instead, they want their talents, interests, hobbies, and education levels to be the ways they make a name for themselves.

They see their faith as a support during challenging times. Prayer is the second most common way that they cope with stress, tied with distracting themselves by watching or reading something.

And while they may often be regarded as an “anxious generation,” they are optimistic about the future. Four in five Gen Z Protestants believe that they can make a meaningful impact in the world for succeeding generations.

Young Life offered CT an exclusive look at these Protestant breakouts from its recent release of The Relate Project, a study which examined the beliefs and aspirations of 7,261 young people between 13 and 24 years old.

Researchers decided not to use the term evangelical in the report because it “can mean different things to different people in different countries,” said Kimberly Nollan, Young Life’s director of research and evaluation.

“The focus of the Relate Project was to better understand Gen Z’s relationships with themselves, with others and with God,” said Nollan. “To keep that focus and avoid mis-interpretations, we chose to avoid that language.”

The study covered eight countries: the US, the UK, Mexico, India, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Tanzania. It surveyed adolescents of various faiths in July and August 2023. The sample of Christians from the study also included those who identified as Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, or other.

Overall, it found that belief in God is integral in boosting Gen Z’s sense of purpose and well-being.

“Young people can experience flourishing apart from faith, but our research found that those without a faith frame (e.g., atheists, agnostics, and nones) report lower levels of flourishing,” the report stated.

Researchers also noted that cultural differences might account for variations in responses. For example, focus groups found that young adults in the four East African countries and India are generally more hesitant to talk to older adults because they fear incurring their disapproval.

For this story, “global” refers to the eight countries surveyed by Young Life.

Reputation and recognition

At least half of young Protestants in the US and UK said that they wanted to be known for their talents (54%), as well as their interests or hobbies (52%).

Only around 1 in 3 (32%) wanted to be recognized for their religion or beliefs.

Survey results were similar in East Africa, India, and Mexico. Just under half (43%) of Gen Z Protestants in these countries preferred to be known for their educational qualifications, while 2 in 5 (40%) wanted their talents to be recognized first.

The desire to be identified by their religion or beliefs ranked fourth (27%).

These findings are consistent with what Alexis Kwamy has observed about Gen Z believers in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, where he is based.

“This shift suggests a new way of integrating faith into daily life, where religious identity isn’t always openly expressed but is instead intertwined with personal achievements and social contributions,” Kwamy told CT.

Chris Agnew, a Pioneer Mission leader at Coastal Church in Portrush, Northern Ireland, agreed. “Religion is either a dirty word, or it’s a private thing,” he said. “Spirituality would be more warmly received, but it’s easier to say to someone [that] you’re good at singing or playing football than having a faith or engaging in church.”

Other leaders think that the survey findings are debatable.

“Young people introduced to Christ at an early age appreciate [being known for their] religious beliefs,” said Patrick Barasa, general secretary of campus ministry Focus Uganda. “It’s those that tend towards secularism that live according to interests.”

The traditional format of church participation may also contribute to how Gen Z Protestant identity is being formed, said Mary Olguin, general secretary of student ministry Compa (Compañerismo Estudiantil) in Mexico.

There is a perception that “a Christian is excellent based on how they serve (for example, by showcasing their talent in worship), rather than by their fruits,” she said.

Raychel Sanders, 21, is an avid runner and rock climber. But she has learned to also be comfortable building a public Christian identity.

As a freshman at Mississippi State University, she commented on the beauty and intricacy of creation during a conversation with an agnostic professor at school. She remembers he gave her a funny look.

Since that incident, however, Sanders has answered her professor’s questions about Christianity and shared her faith with him several times.

Beyond being recognized for her outdoor pursuits, she wants to be known for “having compassion on people for the sake of winning them to Christ, but without compromising on what is true,” she said.

Other young adults, like Ananya Rachel Mathew from Uttar Pradesh, India, asserted that one’s abilities can be used to represent and honor God.

“All our talents come as a gift from our Father above,” said the 21-year-old, who enjoys singing, dancing, and painting. “The Father who has bestowed our talents upon us [would] be pleased if we employed them to praise and glorify his name.”

Prayer and stress

Globally, prayer ranks second (43%) among Gen Z Protestants as a coping mechanism for stress and is tied with distracting themselves by watching or reading something (43%). Listening to music is ranked first (62%), while reading or meditating on Scripture is ranked fifth from last (19%).

Gen Zers tend to lead a fast-paced life and may not make time for individual prayer, says Olguin in Mexico. “This dynamic often causes prayer, which is often perceived as a passive practice or not directly linked to their immediate achievements, to be relegated to the background or performed quickly and mechanically,” she said.

Yet Olguin noticed that more students attended Compa’s prayer meetings after the pandemic and believes this is because they enjoy praying in community.

Though public prayer may come naturally to young Mexican believers, that’s not the case with the teenagers Bruce Campbell works with at his Northern Ireland–based youth ministry, Exodus.

“The most common fear I hear young people expressing in terms of prayer is their fear of praying out loud in a group setting,” he said.

Campbell has noticed a rising interest in listening to worship music among young Christians in his region, which he surmises may be linked to their increasing desire to seek emotive experiences.

“Although I see this as largely a positive thing, I am sometimes cautious of how this trend can lead to a less than costly discipleship,” Campbell said. “It’s much easier to chill to a Bethel album than to read the minor prophets or tell your friend about Jesus.”

Mental health concerns

Caring for their personal mental health and their communities’ mental well-being was a top priority for Gen Z Protestants across the eight countries surveyed, ahead of other concerns like adequate job opportunities, climate change, and religious tensions.

In the UK, poor mental health “has reached almost pandemic proportions,” said Sonia Mawhinney, Young Life’s regional director for the UK and Ireland. The lack of professional help available has also placed “a heavy strain on both full-time and volunteer youth leaders to try to help young people in this mental health crisis,” she said.

At present, the ministry is exploring ways to partner with schools, churches, sports clubs, and government agencies across the region to provide support and care for young people.

“The thrust towards self-help and wellness in society at the moment can be confusing for young people,” said Agnew, one of the Northern Ireland–based leaders. He noted that it’s hard for Gen Z believers to figure out where Jesus comes into the picture.

“The challenge is to gently accompany people on their journeys, but also not allow anyone’s own struggles to remove the divine invitation to partner with God [in] what he’s doing in the world,” he said.

Building stronger intergenerational relationships is another important factor in addressing the mental health struggles that Gen Z believers face, leaders told CT.

“The silence around the topic of mental health from older generations is creating distance from our next generations,” said Tanita Maddox, Young Life’s associate regional director in Spokane, Washington. “[We ought to] be Jesus weeping at the tomb of Lazarus, even though Jesus knew he would raise Lazarus again.”

In March, Olguin and her team finished work on a manual titled Salud mental en la pastoral universitaria (mental health in campus ministry) that equips leaders working with Gen Zers in Mexico.

The manual, which covers topics like the theology of emotions and burnout syndrome, was created in collaboration with the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students’ (IFES) Logos and Cosmos Initiative. A second edition is currently in progress and is slated to publish next February.

Young Life Mexico, meanwhile, is conducting a study to examine the mental, physical, and emotional health of leaders and kids involved in the ministry, according to its regional director Pratt Butler.

Future impact

More than 4 in 5 (83%) of Gen Z Protestants believe they can change the world for good.

Gen Zers with a religious affiliation feel more empowered to effect change, the Relate Project found. “Protestant and Orthodox Christians have the strongest sense of agency, while it is lowest in atheists, agnostics, and ‘nones,’” the report noted.

Evangelizing “to as many people around as possible” is how Mathew, the 21-year-old in India, envisions creating a meaningful impact on successive generations. “We are his people who have been ordained to carry out a very specific task—which is to spread his word to others who don’t know about our Lord," she said.

Some leaders, however, think that one’s faith may not necessarily boost one’s level of influence, particularly if faith is merely regarded as a private, personal relationship with God.

“For our young people, action to make the world a better place is fragmented or disconnected from their Christian faith,” said Maddox, the Young Life US associate regional director. “[But] our relationship with God should push us to bring the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth by caring about the things God cares about, and acting on those things.”

This generation is very compassionate, said Mawhinney, the Young Life UK and Ireland director. “Young people are pleasantly astonished when they encounter what the Bible has to say about their passion for justice and creation care,” she said.

“When we teach them the full meta-narrative of Scripture and how God’s redemptive vision includes the necessity for love of neighbor and the world he made, young people are both surprised and inspired to see that their passion is in sync with God’s.”

Additional reporting by Surinder Kaur

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Ideas

Who Is My Neighbor?

Nikki Toyama-Szeto

How Christians can love well in a digitized, global, and polarized world.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

My neighborhood, just outside of Washington, DC, has a strong sense of local community. I know the people on our block, and I love bumping into folks—at PTA meetings, sports outings, or the grocery store. My neighborhood has quaint traditions: We celebrate holidays with cookie exchanges. Local groups play music on front lawns in the summer. On these lovely nights when people are walking the block, I don’t see the divisions and divides that worry me when I read the news.

So I was surprised a couple of months ago to find out that I didn’t actually know many of my neighbors. One of my kids was collecting items for a service project. On a Saturday morning, we slowly walked the block, placing a flyer at each door. With half a stack of flyers left, we continued to the next block—a block I walk or drive often.

But the slowness of the task caused me to pause, to stop at each door, to see each place where people live. I noticed the numbers on the walls, the color of the doors. And I was surprised at how many homes I had never “seen” before. I was surprised, just one block away, how few of the people I knew. Before that day, I would have called these folks my neighbors. In reality, I didn’t know my neighbors.

Throughout the Gospels, we see the exhortation to “love your neighbor as yourself” and to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matt. 22:37–40; Mark 12:29–31). But who is my neighbor (Luke 10:29)? And what does being a neighbor look like in a time of such polarization?

When I try to make sense of what it means to love my neighbor, I think of Acts 1:8. In this passage, Jesus exhorts his followers to bear witness to the power of his resurrection in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. Jerusalem was essentially the disciples’ city. Judea was the larger region that contained their local city. Samaria was a region just next to Judea—a place that was adjacent and had a different ethnic group. And the ends of the earth were, well, everywhere else.

I use these categories of Jerusalem (the city where I am), Judea and Samaria (the region I’m in and the one next to it), and “the ends of the earth” (everyone else) to help me think about whom I consider my neighbor. I try to make sure I have neighbors in each of these groups.

Jesus’ invitation to his first followers to bear witness is extended to us today—to be people who bear witness to Jesus “in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

When I’m trying to navigate tricky issues, expanding my definition of neighbor like this helps. I try to use these three categories of people to stretch me to care about people just beyond my natural inclination—people in the place where I am, the place just next to me, and a place farther away.

How does an issue affect people like me? Or people who are adjacent to me—nearby, but perhaps affected slightly differently? And how does it affect people with whom I don’t have much in common, people who seem far from me? And what response to this issue would bear witness to God’s character and love to each of these different groups?

That final group, the ends of the earth, seems like a catchall: Did I miss anyone? Well, reach out to them too. One of my favorite insights about missions comes from an Indigenous Christian theologian who pointed out to me that North America might be part of what the early church imagined as “the ends of the earth.” It’s humbling to think that I am someone else’s “ends of the earth.” And at the same time, it nudges me to do the extra work of caring about someone different, perhaps even at odds with my group.

With each of these circles, I try to think, How can I love this group of neighbors as myself? How can I learn more about the realities of their daily life, their priorities, and their cares? And how can I carry that perspective with me as I think about my role as a Christian committed to social action? Are there places where I can journey alongside, add my voice as a support, and function as a neighbor in this diverse and dynamic place where we live?

Caring only about the people nearest to us or most like us doesn’t bear witness to our God, who cares for all people and calls people from all nations to become part of his family. Only seeking the good of those who live near us or live like us can lead us to perpetuate economic, racial, ethnic, or other divisions. That lifestyle doesn’t bear witness to Jesus’ power to be a peacemaker who is able to remove dividing walls and bring unity to groups separated by hostility (Eph. 2:14–15).

Our current political system encourages a self-serving posture. It leads us to ask, “How do I accumulate power and use it to push through my demands and center my priorities for my own well-being?” This perpetuates a game where there are winners and losers.

In a world like this, one of the most compelling ways we Christians can bear witness is by being generous with our hearts, passions, and interests and by using our voices, votes, and energy on behalf of our neighbors. We can love our neighbors as ourselves and love God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

My hope is that Christians would not play politics the way the world does, but rather—filled with an abundance that comes from being unconditionally loved, repeatedly forgiven, and embraced by a caring, powerful, and compassionate God—feel generous with our love, hope, and faith.

We can not only love the neighbors who have commonalities with us but also love the neighbors who are just over and beyond our reach. In this way, we can be people who bear witness to and live in the reality of Jesus, the peacemaker who removes walls of hostility and offers reconciliation generously.

Nikki Toyama-Szeto is the executive director of Christians for Social Action.

Learn more about Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy.

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Ideas

The Evangelicalism of Jimmy Carter

Daniel K. Williams

Contributor

The former president, who turns 100 on Tuesday, was elected while serving as a Southern Baptist deacon. But he was never fully welcomed by white evangelicals as one of our own.

Former President Jimmy Carter teaches Sunday School class at Maranatha Baptist Church in Georgia.

David Goldman / AP Images

When Jimmy Carter spoke about his faith in Christ while campaigning for president in 1976, many evangelicals were ecstatic.

No previous presidential candidate had claimed to be “born again” or spoken so openly about his relationship with Jesus. Nor had any welcomed journalists to his adult Sunday school class, which Carter continued to teach even while running for the White House. But then again, no other presidential candidate was a deacon in a Southern Baptist church.

The United States needed a “born-again man in the White House,” Oklahoma pastor Bailey Smith told the crowd gathered at the SBC’s annual meeting in June 1976. Then he added, in case anyone missed the hint, “And his initials are the same as our Lord’s!”

But only a few weeks later, Third Century Publishers, an evangelical publishing firm cofounded by Campus Crusade for Christ founder Bill Bright, released a book that sharply criticized Carter’s evangelical bona fides. The book, What about Jimmy Carter?, was written by a young evangelist named Ron Boehme.

When he first heard about Carter’s candidacy, Boehme said, he was “thrilled” that a born-again Christian was running for president. Yet as he learned more about Carter’s beliefs, his opinion of the Democratic candidate quickly soured. Carter, he discovered, had embraced neo-orthodox views of the Bible, and he supported liberal abortion policies as well as gay rights.

Perhaps Carter wasn’t really an evangelical at all, Boehme decided, or not even a believer. “When a man promotes or goes along with immorality and ungodliness in his political campaigning and lawmaking, he is not a true follower of Jesus,” he wrote. Appropriating one of Jesus’ statements in the Sermon on the Mount, Boehme doubled down: “A good tree cannot produce bad fruit.”

Boehme was hardly alone in this conclusion. Although Carter won approximately half the white evangelical vote in 1976, many evangelicals echoed Boehme in their questions about his faith during the weeks leading up to the election. Carter’s interview with Playboy magazine disturbed many conservative Christians, and so did a few of his policy positions.

By 1980, some evangelicals who had once supported Carter (such as the Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson) were at the forefront of the movement to defeat him at the polls. Carter, they decided, had promoted “secular humanism” through his promotion of a feminist agenda and his refusal to oppose gay rights. Indeed, it was largely a reaction against Carter’s presidential policies that prompted the political mobilization of the Religious Right and the strong evangelical support for Ronald Reagan in 1980.

After Carter left office, the rift between him and the increasingly conservative leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention continued to grow. Carter eventually left the Southern Baptist Convention to join the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a denomination that ordained women and rejected some of the SBC’s conservative political stances.

But Carter continued to call himself an evangelical Christian. He continued to speak of reading the Bible daily, praying constantly, and teaching weekly Sunday school classes at his Baptist church. His volunteer work through Habitat for Humanity became legendary. And he frequently shared his faith with others, including with non-Christian international leaders while he was president.

He also wrote several books about his faith. “I am convinced that Jesus is the Son of God,” he said in his final book on the subject, published in 2018. Jesus is his “personal savior,” he declared, as well as “an exemplary personal guide for a way for me and others to live. … The basis elements of Christianity apply personally to me, shape my attitude and my actions, and give me a joyful and positive life, with purpose.”

After consulting the description of evangelicalism provided in a Wikipedia article and supplementing it with information from one of his Bible commentaries, Carter concluded in the book that not only was he a Christian, he was an “evangelical Christian.” He had been born again; he shared his faith with others; and he loved Jesus as his Savior. What could be more evangelical than that?

But clearly there was a difference between Carter’s understanding of the faith and the views of his evangelical critics. His born-again experience of conversion may have resembled theirs, and his devotion to prayer and Bible reading may have been just as strong, but on two issues Carter parted ways with conservative evangelicals of the late 20th century and beyond: biblical inerrancy and politics.

Those were the very issues at the heart of the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention that began while Carter was in office. For many conservative evangelicals of the 1970s—Harold Lindsell, Francis Schaeffer, and the leaders of the conservative faction within the Southern Baptist Convention—biblical inerrancy was central to the evangelical identity. Without an inerrant Bible, Protestant Christians would have no fixed, transcendent source of authority, they argued. The Reformation principle of sola scriptura, combined with an understanding of God’s perfection and sovereignty, demanded an inerrant scripture.

Many of these evangelicals also argued that the American government needed a fixed, transcendent moral standard based on Christian principles. Legal abortion and a new public celebration of sexual immorality were the result of politicians and judges who had forgotten God’s law, they said.

Their vision of Christianity as an influence in the public sphere primarily meant championing Christian moral principles in the face of growing secularization. They thought that the sexual revolution, along with second-wave feminism, was perhaps the greatest threat that the American family had ever experienced. And they were determined to stop that threat by electing godly people to office, people who would be guided by God’s law, not contemporary cultural trends.

But Carter did not share any of these views. His political and religious ideas were shaped not by a reaction against the sexual revolution but by experience of the civil rights movement. Like other white southerners of his generation, Carter grew up amid racial segregation and inequality, and he concluded that the white evangelical churches of his region were mostly on the wrong side of Black Americans’ struggle for justice.

Carter’s own Baptist church in Plains, Georgia, was officially segregated until 1976. The congregation voted in the 1960s against accepting Black people as members, and Carter opposed that decision but did not immediately leave the church. Yet, as he recalled years later in his book Faith: A Journey for All, he was inspired by the examples of other Christians who took the countercultural stance of reaching across the color line in the segregated South. Only a few miles from his home in Plains, for example, Millard and Linda Fuller started an interracial Christian communal farm named Koinonia—then later founded Habitat for Humanity.

Encounters with people like the Fullers convinced Carter that what the country needed was not a public campaign to take America back for God. It was a practical emulation of the ethics of Jesus. This, after all, was how African American Christian advocates for civil rights had gained the support of previously oppositional white Christians, who were moved by the activists’ example of Christlike love.

Carter was so impressed by that example that he framed his entire Christian faith around this principle rather than around any specific doctrinal statements. But the more that he read Scripture, the more impressed he was by the ethics of Christ and the more he wanted to have Jesus as his “constant companion” by grace through faith.

For Carter, then, biblical inerrancy was a non-issue. Perhaps the Bible did contain some internal contradictions that could not be harmonized, he decided, and perhaps parts of the Bible did need to be reinterpreted in the light of modern science. But that really didn’t matter as long as the general narrative of Jesus’ life was historically correct.

And the Christian Right’s political priorities were misguided, Carter likewise determined, because they were centered not around the ethics of Jesus but around an erroneous notion that family values could be imposed through law. As an Arminian Baptist, Carter opposed creeds, believed in the priesthood of all believers, and strongly insisted that faith must be freely chosen to be true. It could not be dictated by legislation, he argued in multiple books, including Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis and Faith: A Journey for All.

Following Jesus in public office, then, could not mean imposing Christian standards through law. For Carter, it had to mean acting with integrity and with concern for all people. And if the nation turned to God, the fruit of this conversion would not necessarily be laws against same-sex marriage or abortion. It would be a dedication “to the resolution of disputes by peaceful means” and a commitment to “freedom and human rights” for others, including especially the rights of women, which he believed too many conservative evangelicals ignored.

Functionally, Carter’s faith had more in common with mainline Protestantism than with late 20th- or early 21st-century American evangelicalism—and evangelicals weren’t incorrect when they observed that difference. But Carter was also a lifelong Baptist who believed in born-again conversion, a personal relationship with Jesus, and the need to share one’s faith with others. He always spoke of faith with an evangelical accent, and despite his differences with more conservative Christians, he cherished a love for the same Savior.

With the perspective of history—thanks to the longest post-presidency in American history—those commonalities are perhaps easier to see now than they were in 1980. Carter’s determination to extend the love of Jesus was a better reflection of the Sermon on the Mount than his evangelical critics realized.

Daniel K. Williams teaches American history at Ashland University and is the author of The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship.

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News

Widespread Helene Misery Stretches Christian Relief Groups

Emily Belz

Organizations respond to destruction in Florida, Georgia, and rural Appalachia, but they must pull resources from as far away as Canada.

Men inspect damage in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Asheville, North Carolina.

Sean Rayford / Getty Images

Devastating hundreds of miles from the Florida Gulf Coast to Georgia to the mountains of North Carolina, Hurricane Helene has created a complicated equation for Christian organizations that are on the frontline of disaster response.

“In my more than 20 years of disaster experience, I can’t think of a time when such a large area was at risk,” Jeff Jellets, the disaster coordinator for The Salvation Army’s work in the South, said in a statement.

Samaritan’s Purse chief operating officer Edward Graham told CT that the organization had to call in equipment and volunteers from its Canadian arm for its hurricane response and even had to adjust some of its overseas work. Just for this disaster, Samaritan’s Purse is operating in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina.

“We’re running at max capacity for our domestic response,” Graham said. But he added, “Logistically, God has given us the resources and the talent to navigate.”

Still, Christian relief organizations—partnered with local churches—were working on bringing help to the most difficult-to-reach places. In western North Carolina, where record-setting flooding destroyed roads and other infrastructure, mountain communities, including the city of Asheville, were difficult to access.

On Monday, Samaritan’s Purse was setting up an emergency field hospital in North Carolina’s Avery County, a rural area in the Appalachians where search and rescue teams were conducting operations in mountain towns and remote valleys.

The field hospital will function as an emergency room alongside the local hospital in anticipation of an influx of patients from rescue operations. More than 100 have died in the storm.

Graham also said a Samaritan’s Purse helicopter dropped food and water to stranded students at Lees McRae College in the mountains of North Carolina. He said he alerted the North Carolina National Guard that the school would need Chinook helicopter evacuations, and the military airlifted students out on Sunday.

The disaster had engulfed Samaritan’s Purse’s own headquarters in Boone, North Carolina, and its staff were reeling from losing homes in the storm.

The disaster also hit personally for the Graham family in Montreat, North Carolina, where evangelist Billy Graham raised his children. Edward Graham, Billy Graham’s grandson, serves on the board of Montreat College, a Christian college in the same area which also suffered significant damage. Graham said he didn’t know the state of the family home, but he couldn’t give that his attention: “My grandfather lives in heaven.”

“It’s not that there is a lack of supplies and desire to help,” said Amanda Held Opelt, an author and songwriter who worked for Samaritan’s Purse for a decade. She lives in a rural area near Boone called Meat Camp and has family in the surrounding Appalachian hollers.

The only road into Meat Camp is gone, and Opelt knows a pregnant woman who is due soon and stranded. “What we need is a thousand engineers with bridge-building capabilities to get here,” she said.

Graham noted that flooding in a flat plain is one thing, but they were seeing “the power of water in a valley.”

Opelt noted the resilience of people in Appalachia and the small local churches there, cut off from the world but checking on each other and bringing water for the sick and elderly. She was able to navigate into the small Appalachian community of Bakersville, North Carolina, to check on her two aunts.

“They were sitting there eating saltines and vegetables from their garden and washing their bloomers in the creek,” she said. “I started crying when I saw them.”

The most extensive death and destruction is in North Carolina, but communities in Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida are also dealing with destroyed homes and infrastructure.

After the storm, some churches in heavily hit areas met outside to worship on Sunday, locals reported. But some church members and leaders couldn’t communicate with each other at all because of compromised cell service. And others focused on distributing water and food from their properties, which became natural community gathering points.

The Salvation Army quickly deployed 14 mobile units to provide thousands of meals in Florida and Georgia.

Send Relief, the disaster response arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, has 23 response sites set up in six states to respond to Helene, providing food and organizing debris removal and hot showers.

Convoy of Hope, a faith-based disaster response organization that partners with local churches, arrived with supplies in Perry, Florida, on Sunday. Three hurricanes have hit Perry in the last year. The organization was sending supplies on Monday to Morganton, North Carolina; Tampa Bay, Florida; and Augusta, Georgia.

Local organizations and churches have gotten to work as well. Baptist churches in western North Carolina were distributing water, the biggest need in the area.

Evangelical climate scientists warn that local churches and relief organizations will have to adjust to a new normal of these types of super-charged weather events in unexpected places.

Jessica Moerman is a climate scientist and the CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Network. She’s also from Knoxville, Tennessee, near the areas devastated. Her family members lost a home in the 2016 wildfire in nearby Gatlinburg.

“What we’ve seen over the last few years is that we’re just in a new normal,” she said. “We’re seeing it across the Southeast and across Appalachia—small towns saying, ‘This is like nothing we’ve seen before.’”

Moerman explained how seawater warming due to climate change made these storms worse. With Helene, warmer gulf waters meant the storm held more water in the atmosphere and had the strength to go further inland and dump historic rain on western North Carolina—a place so far inland that few would expect it to be vulnerable to hurricanes.

The warm seawater is “rocket fuel that makes these storms stronger and more intense,” she said. “The hurricane has so much more energy, it can travel farther … It’s really, really heartbreaking.”

Christian disaster relief organizations will have to prepare for a situation “where we are expecting worse storms than we’ve ever experienced in the past and expecting to experience them again.”

Organizations responding now are focused on people are still missing from the storm, and staff noted that first responders in these areas are still having issues with communication and are battling their own fatigue.

Graham said Samaritan’s Purse would stay in the disaster areas for the duration.

“This is going to be a very long recovery,” he said. “We do not leave the community till it’s done.”

- More from Emily Belz

Ideas

25 Precepts for This (and Every) Election

Bonnie Kristian

CT Staff; Columnist

On disagreement, faithfulness, forbearance, and votes.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

The high season of American politics is here. Stomachs are knotted. Electoral trend lines undulate. Betting markets tremble.

And what of the American church? Many of us are trembling too: with fear, with rage, with anticipation of whatever may be in store for us in Washington—and in our own kitchens and sanctuaries.

A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine here at CT wrote an article pertaining to politics, and the online backlash was furious. The social media responses crossed every prudential line in Proverbs; they would have made Martin Luther blush.

And it didn’t come from social media bots, machines programmed to automate inhumanity. The names of many respondents were familiar. They weren’t computers; they were Christians. It was us.

When I say “us,” I don’t mean that you are personally sniping on social media; I know I’m not. Rather, I mean that the precepts I offer below are not—cannot be, if they’re of any use—reflections and guidance loftily directed at those people, the Christians who embarrass and frustrate and confound us.

The way we get through this next month and the months to come with any semblance of Christian love and unity is to copy Paul in 1 Timothy: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst” (1:15). And not just to say it, but to mean it.

To that end, here are 25 precepts for an election year:

A Christian’s opposition to Candidate X does not entail her support for Candidate Y. It does not entail it by implication or in practice. To insist otherwise against the protests of your sibling in Christ is to embrace dissension and slander.
You can critique a fellow Christian’s politics without questioning his faith, and both of you should be able to hear the difference.
Your critique of a fellow Christian’s politics may well include reminding her of the commitments and obligations of her faith.
Your critique of a fellow Christian’s politics may never persuade him. At a political impasse with a sibling in Christ, mutual forbearance and grace is usually a better way forward than ongoing argument. What better things could you each be doing with your time?
There is a line across which a Christian’s politics might justifiably cast doubt on her profession of faith. The line may not be where we assume it to be.
That line may even be different for different Christians in different times, places, and stages of sanctification, for God does not address our every sin, error, and weakness at once.
Some of us may need more courage of our convictions, especially if we find ourselves a religious, political, or cultural minority in our churches and wider communities.
But most of us, in this brash and hasty culture, are more likely to need forbearance and grace for those we believe to be less spiritual, moral, intelligent, or knowledgeable than ourselves.
Forbearance isn’t tolerance. Grace is not condescension.
Nor are forbearance and grace indecision and cowardice.
Remember 1 John 4:20: “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar.”
Lasting political disagreement among Christians is not by itself evidence of sin, unbelief, or any other dysfunction. Reasonable, faithful Christians may in good faith reach different conclusions. They may all have solid biblical support for their views; they may all seek the common good; they may all seek to love their neighbors; they may always disagree.
Your voting choices are constrained by the realities of our electoral system. You can vote third party or write in a name, but don’t pretend these are politically viable candidates when they are not.
Reasonable, faithful Christians may decide to only seriously consider viable candidates.
Reasonable, faithful Christians may decide that viability is less important than ethical and policy alignment.
Reasonable, faithful Christians may decide not to vote: “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help” (Psalm 146:3, KJV).
Hope is a Christian virtue; wishful thinking is not.
Wisdom is a Christian calling; cynicism is not wise.
No candidate is owed your vote. Not even if you believe you have a duty to vote. Not even if you’re registered to one party or another. Not even if you live in a swing state.
With some exceptions, down-ballot votes—especially for state and local officials, judges, and ballot initiatives—will have more frequent and more tangible effects on your life and those of your neighbors than votes for president.
This is probably not the most important election of your lifetime. If it is the most important election of your lifetime, you can’t know that in real time. You may be able to make that assessment 5 or 10 or 20 years hence, but you cannot know now.
Your vote is not passed along to the candidates with an explanatory note. The candidates do not know you felt conflicted or were strategically voting to change the direction of the opposing party. They only know they have won with the support of however many thousands or millions of Americans, and they will act in those voters’ name—that is, in your name.
What you do in the privacy of the voting booth is your own business and may be kept secret. But if you find yourself hesitant or ashamed to share how you voted, ask yourself why.
All told, your individual vote is of negligible import in determining the electoral outcome or the future of the country. It may be of substantial spiritual import for you.
“Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–39).

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

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News

Can a Lebanese Seminary Move Beyond the Liberal-Conservative Impasse?

Interview by Jayson Casper

Martin Accad, the new president at Near East School of Theology, speaks at its campus in Beirut.

Courtesy of Near East School of Theology

The oldest Protestant seminary in the Middle East has a new vision.

Officially founded in 1932 but with origins dating back to the 19th-century missionary movement, the Near East School of Theology (NEST) is operated by the Presbyterian, Anglican, Lutheran, and Armenian Evangelical denominations.

Installed this week, its 11th president is a nondenominational Lebanese evangelical.

Martin Accad, formerly academic dean at Arab Baptist Theological Seminary (ABTS), was installed on Sunday at the historic institution’s Beirut campus. He graduated from NEST in 1996 with a bachelor of theology degree, eventually earning his PhD from the University of Oxford. Awarded scholarships by the World Council of Churches and the evangelical Langham Partnership, Accad is a locally controversial theologian who, like NEST, straddles the liberal-conservative dichotomy.

Author of Sacred Misinterpretation: Reaching Across the Christian-Muslim Divide, Accad has urged believers to approach Islam in a manner that avoids the twin pitfalls of syncretism and polemics. But before joining NEST he resigned his prior academic position at ABTS to apply his biblical convictions within Lebanon’s contested political scene. Creating a research center, his last four years have been spent in pursuit of reconciliation between Lebanon’s often-divided sectarian communities.

Accad will now bring his vision to a new generation of Middle East seminarians.

Although doing public theology is novel for the institution, NEST has long sought, with some struggle, to balance the two streams of its early predecessors’ commitments to evangelistic outreach and service-oriented witness. Its founding in 1932 resulted from a merger of two programs, each with its own distinctives.

One stream of NEST’s roots dates to 1856, when American missionaries began what Accad describes as a discipleship training program in the mountains of Lebanon. Along with providing pastoral development, it functioned as a mission station for sharing the gospel in local villages with non-Protestant Christians and diverse Muslim communities. Its remote location was also designed to isolate these early “seminarians” from the corruption of city life in Beirut.

American outreach to Armenians and Arabs in the Ottoman Empire (modern-day Turkey) led to the creation of similar schools beginning in 1839. After the Armenian genocide in World War I, these efforts relocated to Athens where they coalesced into a seminary that adopted an ecumenical, Enlightenment-informed model, emphasizing the importance of social service. This was especially true in its approach to Islam—sympathetic and comparative with an eye toward reconciliation.

The merger of these two programs created NEST, which eventually settled in the cosmopolitan Hamra neighborhood of Lebanon’s capital. Although it is situated near three historic Protestant liberal arts colleges—now known as the American University of Beirut (AUB), the Lebanese American University (LAU), and the Armenian-led Haigazian University—early cooperation was shattered by the Lebanese civil war in 1975 and has not been re-established.

Accad wants to restore this collaboration and embody an integration of scholarship and discipleship. CT spoke with him about Protestant distinctives, “electric shock” pedagogy, and how to understand the mainline-evangelical divide in the Middle East.

Why does serving as president of NEST appeal to you?

We need to rethink what it means to be a seminary student today. This question is a key issue globally, but especially in the Middle East. Ideally, the seminary leads the church to be relevant in society. This requires beginning with society and determining its needs. And then the seminary addresses the church—what does the pastor need? Finally, it works backward and designs a program to fit this profile.

Historically, NEST has been an ordination track. This is the traditional model, and it is still necessary if the church believes that it is. But I want to explore with the churches their vision for seminary training, for congregational service, and for regional witness—and how NEST can help prepare leaders to implement this vision.

How do you plan to prepare leaders to serve the church?

Nontraditional, focused tracks are becoming the way people want to learn. Accrediting bodies speak of micro-credentials that may contribute toward academic goals but have value in and of themselves and fit into the bigger puzzle of what students want to do with their lives.

But this system of training should not be only for evangelicals. I want NEST to attract Catholic and Orthodox students also, to think together about how to impact the reality around us. And as we design our programs, I will engage civil society and political activists, where the conversation might be challenging. Many of these people have been turned off by religion due to the sectarian religious landscape of Lebanon, so my interactions with them will be an act of witness.

I can testify on behalf of NEST that God, the church, and theological education are not just internal affairs within the boundaries of our community. No, the church is in society and serves society, and if it is not leading the process of societal change, then it is not following its calling.

How do nonevangelicals fit into a Protestant seminary?

NEST will always be a place of theology and religious studies. I don’t see NEST starting a program in business. But I would like us to reflect on theologies of poverty, just economics, and corruption. These are real problems in Lebanon and the surrounding region, and more Lebanese should be equipped to address them at the spiritual level.

Courtesy of Near East School of Theology

Abeih Seminary in Mount Lebanon

We have students in our churches getting degrees in liberal arts at local universities who do not know how this education fits within a larger calling. They have grown up in the church or experienced a heart conversion as an adult, and while they want to serve God, they don’t see themselves as pastors.

Catholic and Orthodox students are similar, devoted to God in their contemplative practices but not knowing how to integrate this strength into secular life. These students should have the opportunity to take classes at NEST to think more deeply about their degrees in business, engineering, or history.

How will this integration develop?

I will have dialogues with AUB, LAU, and Haigazian about cross-registration and joint institutional credits. Though we have a shared history, many professors at these universities do not know that NEST exists.

At some point, Protestants divided university education into separate tracks for liberal arts and seminary study, as in the American Ivy League. Some of this was due to tensions between evangelism and the social gospel, which contributed to a dichotomy between mainline and evangelical churches.

But in light of God’s overarching sovereignty, it is biblical to combine them into a coherent whole so that public theology can become the life of the church. And as evangelicals seek to repair this breach—as in the Lausanne Covenant—our modern world no longer has a need for these separate paradigms.

What nags at me locally, however, is that while higher education institutions in Lebanon and the Middle East have done a wonderful job forming global citizens and experts in specific fields, they take pride when graduates become dual citizens and succeed abroad. I feel that this is a loss. I want graduates to stay here and explore their calling in their home country.

This is vocation—to make your career count in God’s perspective.

Will NEST remain a Protestant institution?

The vision I spelled out is very Protestant. It is about social transformation. There have been many different and opposing voices in our tradition about how much of our toe to dip into society, politics, and current affairs. But for me, it is theology that sets the framework for this engagement.

NEST is the only evangelical body in the Levant that belongs to the Association of Theological Institutes in the Middle East (ATIME). I hope to hire qualified Catholic and Orthodox professors. But while we will offer a broadly Christian education, other denominations will still consider us Protestant, which in our essence we will remain.

I am nonsectarian, so this is a difficult question for me. Lebanese Protestants take pride in how they have contributed to Lebanon by building hospitals and schools and in how they demonstrate an ethic of love and honest work. We aim to care for the whole person.

But these contributions no longer distinguish us from the rest of society. Nor do we want to pine for our past glories. Protestantism, for me, is about reformation, a countercurrent that improves upon what has become ineffective. It then impacts society and contributes to human well-being and the common good.

Ideally, our denominational heritage also leads to personal transformation as a disciple of Jesus. This is the church’s responsibility, and Christian involvement in society is one of the strongest testimonies to the power of Christ.

Among local evangelicals, NEST has a reputation as a liberal institution.

This is true, even within its four denominations. Some students have entered NEST excited to study and left with serious skepticism about matters of faith. My experience is that NEST has been a mixed bag of theology. It receives faculty sent by mainline partners in the West, and sometimes the vetting could have been more thorough. While many professors have been conservative, others have been quite liberal.

How are “liberal” and “conservative” defined in the Lebanese context?

Academic theologians read all the same books and think very much alike on core issues. The difference is in pedagogy—how they communicate knowledge, not the knowledge that they have.

Many professors teach as if they must communicate everything to first-year students on day one. They act as if the purpose of theological education is to give budding seminarians an electric shock, provoking an existential crisis that will hopefully lead to greater maturity. I have heard faculty members talking in the coffee room about how students are having doubts in their faith, as if this is something to be proud of.

Pedagogy should be about helping people grow and mature, to make them better citizens and Christian leaders. It is a process of walking alongside someone.

But neither is conservative indoctrination the point.

Over the years, evangelicals have started other seminaries in response to NEST, which were then critiqued similarly. On the whole, it is impossible to do serious theology for very long without the risk of being viewed as too liberal by local churches, unless an institution works very hard to stay connected to them.

Pedagogy is important, but so is content.

No one theological position has categorized NEST, which is not problematic in itself. But when one is hiring professors who do not all come from a single confessional background, an agreed-upon framework is necessary to ensure consistency in the formation of students.

I want to recruit faculty members who fit within our classical Reformed heritage. We believe in the Nicene doctrines of Jesus’ divinity, virgin birth, physical resurrection, and second coming. Concerning the authority of Scripture, Lebanese Protestants are quite conservative but sometimes too literalist.

NEST has an open evangelical position in terms of how to interpret literary genres, keeping some questions unanswered—for example, understanding the violence of God in the Bible. Women’s ordination is a matter where the mainline denominations here have made more progress than the more conservative streams of evangelicalism.

I’m excited about this side of NEST, which it pioneered in the Middle East.

On other issues, such as gender and sexual orientation, we all still have quite conservative views that reflect our conservative social boundaries. We must honor our church community with great sensitivity and with a faithful biblical hermeneutic. But we also need to better familiarize ourselves with all sides of current social and scientific research rather than rallying for any specific interpretation of a cultural cause.

How do you fit personally into the evangelical church community?

Within the mainline Protestant churches of Lebanon, I am viewed as quite conservative. Among Baptists I’ve been perceived—unjustly I would say—as too liberal. These communities are more alike than different, with much overlap in their Venn diagrams. But I won’t be an “odd fish” at NEST.

Those who are considered liberal Protestants in the Middle East are more akin to the conservative-leaning mainline churches in America. I am more concerned about NEST’s pedagogical framework than about its position on the conservative-liberal spectrum. For me, it is most important to determine how to help students get to an understanding that builds their faith and their ability to be pastors and leaders who serve their communities.

One wing of the Middle East church is said to be ecumenical, the other evangelistic. Is this fair?

These are characterizations. Mainline Protestants here care about witnessing to Jesus. Not everyone will actually evangelize, just as not every Baptist will. And the traditional evangelical approach of trying to convert everyone who “doesn’t look like me” is becoming increasingly less common.

It disturbs me when someone says, “I met this priest or monk, and I preached the gospel to him.” What arrogance toward someone who is dedicated to God’s calling. The nonecumenical approach is disastrous. Christian maturity is to preach the gospel in a way that introduces people to Jesus while journeying with them—not simply winning converts to one’s own tradition.

How will you implement this spirit at NEST?

I look for three things when searching for a church: vibrant worship, biblical teaching, and outreach in the community. A seminary should not be different.

Intellectual learning is dry; this becomes problematic if not accompanied by a life of worship, prayer, and application. Solid biblical theology is born not from discussion over what is conservative or liberal but by a devotional practice that feeds into transformation of the community.

If worship and witness result from theology, then it is a theology that works, protected from the two extremes.

- More from Jayson Casper

Ideas

Faith Lived Close to the Land

Brian Reisinger

Growing up on a farm indelibly shaped my understanding of God and his creation. It’s an increasingly uncommon experience.

Julian Scholl / Unsplash

My dad eased his pickup truck along the rolling sidehill, tracing the curves in the rows of hay stretching before us, the steering wheel wandering beneath his hand. The afternoon sun was high and warm. We could have fallen asleep beneath its affectionate glow, were it an afternoon lazy enough to let our family rest.

But it was not such an afternoon—for our family of farmers, few afternoons were. My dad threw the truck in park, and at just four years old, I knew this stop was important enough for me to jump out and tramp across the field behind him. He knelt alongside a row of hay he’d recently cut and felt the fallen alfalfa with his hands. Then he looked at the sky, pondering the weather that could either bless or curse his work.

It was a moment that showed me the spirituality of living close to the land, where the beauty of God’s creation, the risk of hardship, and the work that binds them together are always close at hand. This is a life familiar to generations of God’s people, including most of the Bible’s first hearers. Jesus spoke to crowds of farmers, people who could easily make sense of his parables of seeds and fields and failing crops. But this experience of faith lived close to the land, which I grew up with, is slipping away in our country today.

America drew its earliest economic strength from the natural resources of this vast land, but we are no longer a nation of farmers. From a height of nearly 6.5 million family farms, the United States has fewer than 2 million—often losing them at the rate of tens of thousands per year nationwide, according to federal data. In my home state of Wisconsin, we’re losing as many as three farms per day.

And closing or consolidating farms aren’t the only changes coming to America. Ranches and forests are falling to urban development and economic decline, and our population is steadily urbanizing, shifting from nearly 60 percent rural in the 1940s to just 14 percent rural in 2020.

This is not a culturally and spiritually neutral economic shift. For many of us, loss of life close to the land means loss of regular encounters with God’s creation. It means we are more likely to see the world God made on a small and merely recreational scale: in a tame public park instead of a woodland wild with life or a field furrowed with crops to come.

The spiritual effects may be most measurable in rural areas—where addiction is rampant and we see rising deaths of despair—but I see a connection too between this loss and our larger mental health crisis, as well as the deep political divisions between rural and urban Americans.

I also know my own faith would look very different were it not farm grown. When my dad crouched in that field, he was trying to decide how soon the hay would be dry enough to bale. And when he looked up at the sky, he was trying to decide how much time he might have to do it before the rain came. It was a moment of economic decision-making, but it was also inextricable from his connection to creation and our Creator.

This and countless other moments shaped my faith. I grew up Catholic, though our family also attended nondenominational churches at various times. But whatever our church home, I had constant lessons in faith on our land.

As a kid, I was sure my dad could divine the weather. This is laughable to any grown farmer, but it led me to pay attention—to see, like the psalmist, God’s work in the water, clouds, and thunder (Psalm 77:16–19). Working sunup to sundown with my dad was a kind of discipleship, training me in diligence, determination, and dedication. Seeing seeds planted in the spring sprout as alfalfa and corn showed me God’s miracles every harvest. Living with animals taught me that the circle of life—from newborn calves taking their first breath, to dear old dogs taking their last—can point our eyes toward heaven if we let it.

My faith was both tested and confirmed on the farm when I was 14. One morning, my dad woke up to severe bleeding. Operations to address what we thought were digestive issues later turned up cancer.

With my dad sick and undergoing treatment, I rose every morning before the sun. Working alongside a family friend who came to milk our cows and perform the tasks a boy of 14 couldn’t do on his own, I prepared the cows and equipment for milking, cleaned their udders, and helped milk when I got far enough ahead. Then I’d do all the other chores: feeding the livestock, cleaning the barn, leaping from the tractor to the ground and back for one job after another. I’d be back at it in the evening, with school in between.

Along the way, friends from church were the hands of Christ to our family. They dropped off meals, told me what a blessing my work was to my father when they saw the fear and fatigue in my eyes, and rang from house to house with prayer chains. On and on, they taught me a lesson about prayer that has stuck ever since, through times of waxing and waning faith alike. And one day, my dad came back.

These days, I split my time between my family’s farm in Wisconsin and northern California, where my wife’s family lives. I know most people will never become farmers, and though a plurality of Americans say they’d prefer to live in a rural area, they may not be able to move there.

But that doesn’t mean we must be cut off from the land and its revelation of God as Creator. We can teach our children where their food comes from and introduce them to creation in America’s remaining farmland, rural communities, and outdoor places.

My wife and I had a little girl earlier this year. She’s a happy baby who, I’m grateful to say, seems to take after her mother, with watchful eyes and a ready smile. I think a lot about how to teach her what she’ll need to know—about God, about the world, about how to live—and how much she’ll learn rumbling over her grandpa’s fields in a pickup truck.

Brian Reisinger grew up working with his father from the time he could walk. He is the author of Land Rich, Cash Poor and can be found at brian-reisinger.com.

This article is partially adapted from Brian Reisinger’s book, Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family’s Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer.

- More from Brian Reisinger

Culture

Fasting Is A Good Thing. But For Some of Us, It’s Complicated.

Jacinta Read

My history of disordered eating means I practice the spiritual discipline in community and with accommodations.

PM Images / Getty

For a time when I was a child, I wanted nothing unless it was grilled cheese—without the bread. My loving parents accommodated me by placing a special order when we went to restaurants. Eventually, I became a vegetarian after making the connection between the animals I professed to love and what was on my plate.

By the time I was a teenager, I ate a greater variety of dishes. But pickiness had given way to something more sinister. A friend and I ate burgers and fries, then guiltily pooled our money to buy a diet product called Trim Gum. My problematic relationship with food escalated after I left home for boarding school, an ocean away from my family. I went to great lengths to mask the fact that I had started throwing up after every meal.

Many factors contributed to my bulimia. I was a mixed-race girl who had grown up in Hong Kong, where grown-ups pinched children’s cheeks and openly body-shamed others. Supermodels reigned supreme in ’90s pop culture, enforcing waifish beauty standards. It didn’t help that I aspired to be a ballerina. Decades later, I’d learn of the link between disordered eating and neurodivergence; it’s common for autistic people like me to struggle with food in one way or another.

Into all this reached the loving arms of God. My illness was interrupted by amazing grace and a youth group full of new friends who provided me with the community I craved. It was a beautiful but sadly temporary reprieve: Eating disorders are resilient. They can morph and return like the unclean spirit in Matthew 12. And this happened to me in the guise of fasting.

Scripture contains dozens of references to fasting. The psalmist fasts (Ps. 69:10); the prophets fast (Ezra 8:23; Dan. 10:3; Neh. 1:4). Jesus went without food and water for 40 days in the wilderness (Matt. 4:2). In fasting, we give something up in order to deepen our dependence on God; we remove a meal or a drink and fill the space they leave behind with prayer.

But there are physical, mental, and social implications to fasting that can add up to major problems for anyone who has struggled with disordered eating. “When you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that it will not be obvious to others that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen,” instructs Jesus, “and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you” (Matt. 6:17–18). For those with eating disorders, however, secrecy can derail recovery.

As a relatively new Christian in my early 20s, I took to fasting with zeal. It was mid-summer; I was training for a marathon and also undergoing a 40-day “Jesus” fast. I ran miles in the heat, then came home to shower and study the Bible, collapsing in an exhausted heap. I drank clear liquids but I did not eat. I don’t remember what I prayed for; I was simply interested in proving that God’s sustaining power was better fuel than food.

There’s no limit to the ways in which good things can, without care and community, distort into chaos and destruction. Neither the body nor the brain works as God intended unless they are cared for as God intended.

As a fit young person, there would be a delay before I felt the long-term physical consequences of this extreme deprivation. It was the psychological effects that first became apparent. Research shows that the quality and quantity of nutrition directly affect our brain’s neurotransmitters, the chemical messengers responsible for every facet of functioning. I was starving and dehydrated, and I quickly lost my grip on reality.

My descent into irritability and paranoia lasted a few short weeks; it ended when I landed in the local ER after a serious self-inflicted injury. The recovery process since has been an uphill slog. It’s taken years—and it’s taken supernatural levels of loving support from others.

For the first 15 years of my eating disorder recovery, I agreed with my husband: I would not fast. Not during Lent. Not during special times of prayer. I’d come to God in other ways: by reading the Bible and books on theology, listening to podcasts, and taking walks in nature.

On one hand, this wasn’t difficult. People tend to afford fasting (or its absence) some privacy.

On the other hand, it was difficult. The desire to fast never left me. I battled faulty logic, wanting to blame life’s troubles on my failure to give up food and drink. It was hard to shake the idea that if fasting could bring about a breakthrough, then not fasting could be the reason behind any number of problems. As a matter of survival, I had to hold this tension.

My fixation with fasting was more than an eating disorder running into hyper-religiosity. It was what the poet John Keats called an “irritable reaching for certainty.” If fasting could make my prayers more powerful, then there was something I could do to get the outcomes I wanted from God. Not fasting meant giving up a measure of control.

Grappling with this, I stumbled upon the essence of faith. I remembered that the cross was an unearned gift. God’s loving salvation is unconditional. I was loved, even if I never fasted another day in my life.

You’re still here even though I didn’t fast? My prayers assumed a playful tone. Responding in kind, God proved himself as I completed my doctoral studies, a miracle I’d previously thought impossible without fasting. I got on with my life, banking all my faith in a grace that exists in spite of failure.

Instead of fretting about eating or not eating, I allowed God to engage me with art and music. He nourished me with words of life from the Bible and great literature. He drew my family to a healthy church community where we contributed what we could while feeling safe to say no when needed. If the topic of fasting came up, I willed myself to disengage. When thoughts of spiritual discipline came with feelings of obligation, I sensed the Holy Spirit: I love you, don’t do me any favors. My recovery was centered on God’s unmerited grace.

That said, complete freedom around food is an ideal I haven’t yet reached. Instead, I struggle on, remembering Paul with the thorn in his side and the Lord’s words to him: “My grace is sufficient for you, my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9).

This could be the end of the story: I opt out of fasting due to my complicated history with food. For two decades, this was my safe and appropriate stance. There is no shame if the same is the case for you or someone you know.

But in recent years, I’ve felt ready to revisit fasting. There is no overstating the importance of time, which has allowed for gradual healing and greater maturity. Twenty years on, my genuine desire for spiritual formation now grows safely alongside a stubborn commitment to mental and physical health.

This season unfolds under the watchful eyes of my husband, doctors, and therapist. Now, I compare fasting to exercise: It’s not compulsory, but it is beneficial when done for the right reasons and with proper care. People with physical injuries or disabilities might require special accommodations and should use them without shame. I have learned to afford myself the same grace in fasting.

Through experimentation, I’ve found some strategies that work for me. I abstain from solids only; my fasts are shorter; I use nutritional supplementation; I break fasts guilt-free if I feel my motivation veer. I try to let my hunger serve as a call to prayer.

There are new challenges too, such as feeding my family on fast days and being honest with my teens, who are still in their formative years.

I am on track for the 40-day fast I was interested in all those years ago, but the 40 days aren’t consecutive; I’ve been at it for two years already. I have faith that this is fine.

Fasting as a spiritual practice can bring numerous benefits as we heed the call in 1 Corinthians to glorify God in body and spirit. But access to these benefits is complicated for some of us. As we Christians press into spiritual formation, my hope is that we hold space for the community around us, made up of stories and recovery journeys that we might never know.

Jacinta Read is a writer, artist, and neurodiversity advocate. She serves as the Connections Pastor at Vintage Church Pasadena.‌

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News

Lausanne Theologians Explain Seoul Statement that Surprised Congress Delegates

Morgan Lee in South Korea

Leaders of the 33-member Theology Working Group offer insight on their 97-point, 13,000-word declaration.

Ivor Poobalan, principal of Colombo Theological Seminary, and Victor Nakah, international director for sub-Saharan Africa with Mission to the World, served as co-chairs of the drafting committee of the Seoul Statement.

Photography by Morgan Lee

The Lausanne Movement’s decision to release a 97-point, 13,000-word theological statement on the inaugural day of its fourth world congress has sparked a week of debate and conversation.

The seven-part treatise, which stated theological positions on the gospel, the Bible, the church, the “human person,” discipleship, the “family of nations,” and technology, went live online shortly before the event kicked off on Sunday night.

The Seoul Statement “was designed to fill in some gaps, to be a supplement in seven key topics that we have not thought enough about or haven’t reflected or written enough about within the Lausanne Movement,” said David Bennett, Lausanne’s global associate director, on Sunday afternoon, where he met with the media to explain the statement’s vision and purpose.

“We were not trying to create a fourth document which would then replace or make obsolete those earlier three documents,” he added.

The congress organizers also explained at a press conference on Monday that the text was final.

Nevertheless, two days later, Christian Daily International reported that a section addressing homosexuality had been amended after its release. These edits were intended to be made prior to the Seoul Statement’s publication, a Lausanne spokesperson said on Tuesday.

On Thursday, in response to the statement’s release, Ed Stetzer, Lausanne’s regional director for North America, publicly urged the organization to “state emphatically that evangelism is ‘central,’ ‘a priority,’ and ‘indispensable’ to our mission.” Meanwhile, by Friday morning, 235 delegates had signed an open letter organized by Korean Evangelicals Embracing Integral Mission asking the Lausanne Theology Working Group (LTWG), the body that composed the Seoul Statement, to review and revise it with special attention to 10 particular points.

Through Thursday night, no Lausanne leaders had offered an in-depth explanation from the main stage of the Seoul Statement, or of why the statement was finalized prior to the conference—an action that surprised those who, based on previous congresses, had anticipated a document still open to revision based on delegates’ feedback.

On Friday morning, Mike du Toit, Lausanne’s director of communications and content, sent a mass email to delegates, explaining that the Seoul Statement “focuses on certain theological topics identified by the Lausanne Theology Working Group as needing greater attention by the global church, and reflects on them on the basis of the gospel, the biblical story we live and tell.”

“We recognize that in introducing the Seoul Statement, we should have been clearer in explaining its purpose and the way in which participants are invited to engage with it,” he wrote. The email also offered a link to a feedback form.

Du Toit’s email also noted that delegates would be invited to sign a document called the Collaborative Action Commitment during Saturday’s closing session and that this was not related to the Seoul Statement.

Later that morning, Wheaton College president and plenary speaker Philip Ryken mentioned the Seoul Statement and encouraged delegates to provide feedback.

In the meantime, CT heard from dozens of delegates who were confused and frustrated by the lack of formal feedback channels and whose understanding of the purpose of the statement diverged from that presented by Bennett in his Sunday and Monday press conferences.

The process leading to the Seoul Statement began at the end of 2022 when the Lausanne board tapped Sri Lanka’s Ivor Poobalan, principal of Colombo Theological Seminary, and Zimbabwe’s Victor Nakah, international director for sub-Saharan Africa with Mission to the World, as co-chairs of a drafting committee. Poobalan and Nakah worked with 33 theologians from South Africa, India, Ethiopia, Norway, Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Iran, Palestine, Sweden, Singapore, and Zambia.

“We’re not surprised by the conversations that have been generated,” said Nakah. “It’s a theological document, after all, and the topics in this statement are real issues.”

Poobalan and Nakah met with global managing editor Morgan Lee to discuss the Seoul Statement on Thursday afternoon.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How was the task of the Seoul Statement articulated?

Poobalan: We asked ourselves, do we need another statement? There was no need for us to write a document simply because the Congress should produce a document. Our existing Lausanne documents are great in themselves.

But Lausanne leadership felt that as global Christianity grows in new places, a new generation of Christians was not aware of the Lausanne Covenant, Cape Town Commitment, or Manila Manifesto and perhaps not very interested in going back there. Instead, they are concerned about current issues.

For instance, anthropology has become a big issue only in the 21st century, and in the last few years it has become even bigger. So it was important for us to speak to some of these issues. We are not replacing the previous documents, but we’re trying to find ways to add more value to what Lausanne stands for, providing some specific guidelines that will help the global church navigate tough issues.

What was the process of creating the statement?

Poobalan: Throughout these 50 years, we’ve talked about the authority, infallibility, and usefulness of Scripture, but we haven’t really addressed how to interpret it. Our purpose was to address issues that have been somewhat neglected or under duress, such as the major challenge of discipleship or the issue of what it means to be human. That’s how we arrived at these seven subjects, though many others could have been addressed.

Nakah: For those who wonder why we started with the gospel again, it’s because there are now many different “gospels” going around. If evangelicals don’t have some agreed way of reading, studying, and interpreting Scripture, how are we going to find answers to the issues facing the church today? If hermeneutics is not attended to, then it’s just the gospel according to Ivor or Victor.

Why was the statement finalized before the Congress?

Poobalan: Different approaches are possible. The Lausanne Covenant was finalized during the Congress. In Cape Town, there was no final document at the end of the Congress; it came out much later, but listening took place in Cape Town and then the team used that information to complete the document later.

We took the position that we could complete this document, present it at the Congress, and get a sense of the chatter. We haven’t decided what we will do as a result, but we will discuss the input together as Lausanne leadership and see how we will go from there.

Nakah: The way people have responded to the document gives a more accurate picture of the global evangelical world’s theological diversity. But all this conversation being generated is good feedback.

Rightly or wrongly, the document was not meant to be something we present, get feedback on, and then refine. If that is what we wanted, we would have done that. That’s why this feedback is warranted. You don’t present a theological document and have everybody celebrating.

I’ve heard criticism over the lack of formal feedback channels. This hasn’t stopped some delegates from giving feedback. But if this feedback then influences any changes, I can imagine other delegates feeling frustrated that there wasn’t a more formal way of communicating their opinions.

Poobalan: I think that tomorrow [September 27], this will be addressed, and I do think people will be afforded opportunities to give feedback. Of course, feedback was going to come anyway, and once you formalize it, then there’s an expectation as to what you’re going to do with the feedback, and that’s what the Lausanne board will wrestle with.

Nakah: We are very grateful to the board for accepting this document and then taking it from there. But ultimately, it is Lausanne’s document. It needs the movement’s leadership to explain guidelines of how to move forward.

There are probably no other theological statements out there whose process was led by theologians from Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka. How might your background and context have influenced this statement?

Poobalan: I was surprised when Victor and I were asked to co-chair the TWG, because this group plays a critical role and has always had leaders from the Western world. The board’s bold willingness to think differently and invite two co-chairs from the Global South was surprising, but also stimulating and encouraging. On the other hand, we wanted to ensure that the document didn’t just become a matter of the Global South.

To that end, in establishing our team, we looked for people who could represent different parts of the church. Many of these 33 theologians are very well-known, but they were an amazing group who collaborated with each other.

In every meeting with them, I had two feelings: a sense of the great expertise in the room, and sheer humility.

Nakah: There were other times in this process when we realized we needed expertise. On more than one occasion, we would realize that someone was missing, and we had to reach out to someone who had done research in that area, because we knew we were not the experts. We ended up working with people who are far smarter than us and far more clever than us. It was a joy.

Can you point to one or two sections of the Seoul Statement that really evidence the presence of the Global South in this document?

Nakah: As we know, Africa has become the breeding ground of the prosperity gospel. In light of that, the section on the gospel was important, because there is a sense in which we can talk about many gospels on the continent of Africa. We wanted to frame the document in such a way that anyone who reads it will leave with an understanding of the gospel that is refreshing and challenging.

The second great challenge for the Majority World church today is discipleship. Some African theologians still push back when the church in Africa is described as one mile wide and one inch deep. But that’s still the reality.

So if there’s one section that is most critical for the African church going forward, it’s this one. We hope it will challenge church and parachurch leaders to take discipleship seriously.

Poobalan: This document speaks to the issue of theological anthropology. In the church, there is a sense of confusion about what it means to be a redeemed human being. Some people have at times claimed a godlike status or a power beyond what the Bible offers to the redeemed human person.

But also in the area of gender and sexuality, at times the Global South has wondered, “Why is Christianity speaking only from the perspective of the Global North?” In that sense, talking about sexuality and gender was important to clarify that our convictions are not reactions to what’s happening in the West, but expressions of the scriptural position.

Consequently, there’s a whole section on what Scripture teaches about sexuality and gender. There’s a little more Bible exposition there, because of the global church’s need for clarity about what Scripture teaches.

Additionally, the “family of nations” section talks about the importance of peace and what it means to be a nation in both a biblical and modern sense. For instance, can we just equate the historic names of people and countries without context? [Editor’s note: See Section 84 of the Seoul Statement.] We are trying to address current situations in which Christians sometimes find a theological basis for particular positions when taking an approach to war or conflict.

And yet sometimes there are contradictions in our approach. Christians may sometimes denounce all violence against civilians, but at other times they may find theological reasons to justify it.

I’m aware that some Lausanne delegates, because of their home context and those they minister to, found the sections on LGBT issues either too soft or too harsh.

Nakah: For the group that worked on this section, we felt that hermeneutics was a good starting point. So we started by asking, “What does the Bible teach?” In our group, there was general consensus as to what the Bible said, and the disagreements were all about application to real-life contexts.

For those leaders who feel our approach was a little bit soft, I would ask: Is it biblical to insult gay and lesbian people? If you come back to Scripture, the Bible helps you understand that God loves sinners. That’s totally different from a cultural position that demeans them.

How did you choose which conflicts to mention by name in the “family of nations” section?

Poobalan: We recognized that not every conflict could not be mentioned, because that was not the point. Some conflicts have been dealt with to the extent that the country has moved on, like South Africa or Sri Lanka or Northern Ireland. The examples of current conflicts serve as points of reference to discuss the biblical position on conflict and where Christians should stand. We do understand when people feel sensitive and sad that a particular conflict they have experienced is not mentioned.

With regard to Gaza and Israel, this situation is unique because the church is very strongly divided, based on its theology of Israel.

In a way, we would like to see the global church put this issue right in the middle and say, “Let’s talk about this. What is the actual biblical theology of Israel? How does this square with our understanding of the church” (which we have discussed in the third chapter of the statement)? It is important to discuss the particulars of the Seoul Statement, but we would really like the church to get back to asking, “Where does our theological basis come from?”

We hope very much that this work will stimulate the church to engage in conversation. This is not going to be easy, because at the moment a lot of emotion is involved, but we hope that the church will take up this task, since it is painful for the church to be polarized on this issue based on theology.

If I’m a delegate reading the Seoul Statement and I agree with much of it but not all of it, should I still feel that I can be part of the Lausanne Movement?

Nakah: I go back to the question of what unites evangelicals. What are the nonnegotiable fundamentals or essentials of the Christian faith?

When it comes to topical issues, most evangelicals don’t quite understand the overwhelming diversity of the global evangelical body. If anyone decides whether they are in or out of the Lausanne Movement on the basis of this statement, that’s unfortunate.

Poobalan: It’s naive to think that all evangelicals, even in one country, will agree on everything. But we practice this discipline of friendship, recognizing that the essentials of the faith must not be compromised.

Even John Stott and Billy Graham, the founders of the Lausanne Movement, disagreed on certain aspects, but they could remain friends. They reached out to each other. Similarly, in this Congress, our idea of collaboration is not based on all of us thinking identically. Collaboration involves a willingness to stretch out our hand to others who hold to the same core convictions.

What do you want people to know about the way this statement discusses evangelism?

Poobalan: The statement is very clear that evangelism is absolutely important. We’re working away from old dichotomies that separate the message we proclaim from the lives we live. Throughout the statement, there are many references to the importance of verbal proclamation, but verbal proclamation by people who do not demonstrate the reality of what they proclaim will ultimately undermine the truth of the message.

- More from Morgan Lee

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