This Is the Way: How the Dao Helps Chinese People Understand Christ

Ancient philosopher Zhuangzi’s teachings can be a means of evangelism.

One of Zhuangzi's most famous parables: the butterfly dream

WikiMedia Commons / Edits by CT

In the opening lines of the Gospel of John, God’s eternal presence is rendered as “the Word,” a translation of the Greek word logos. In many translations of the Chinese Bible, including the popular Chinese Union Version, you will find this concept rendered as “the Dao (Tao).”

In English, Dao is commonly translated as “the Way.” In Chinese, the word (道) indicates a teaching or way of living that aligns with the heavens. It can also refer to the omnipresent essence of all creation in Daoism, a tradition of thought and religious practice that encourages its followers to seek immortality and achieve wisdom for discerning right responses to circumstances.

What does the Dao, or Word, of God have to do with the Dao of Daoism?

When I lived and taught in China, I encountered many sensitive hearts and inquisitive minds that were open to spiritual matters. Yet these seekers would often turn to the traditions of their ancestors for answers before considering the Christian gospel. My lack of familiarity with Chinese religion and philosophy hindered my witness, and so I decided to become a serious student of Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist traditions.

Now, as a scholar of Chinese Christianity and religions, I have a much better sense of the ways that Chinese philosophy and religion can both converge with and diverge from Christian thought. I have a clearer sense of how people of Chinese descent connect their cultural heritage to their Christian faith.

Christian missionaries and scholars have a long-standing tradition of sincere dialogue with other religious and philosophical traditions. In Acts 17, Paul observes the inscription to an unknown God in Athens, Greece, and proclaims Christ as an expression and fulfillment of some of their traditions. Later, early church fathers like Origen and Augustine utilized Greco-Roman philosophies like Neoplatonism to deepen their understanding of the gospel and extend its reach across pagan Europe.

This pattern of using culture as a bridge for revealing the fullness of the gospel extends to China. Monks from the Assyrian Church of the East preached Christ in Chinese philosophical parlance during the Tang Dynasty in the 6th century. And Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci adopted Confucian modes of thought and discourse to impress the imperial courts of the Ming Dynasty in the 16th century.

Alongside Confucianism, Daoism has shaped Chinese spirituality for centuries, and one of its greatest and most influential figures was the philosopher Zhuangzi.

Little is known about Zhuangzi besides the fact that he was a minor official in Meng (now Shangqiu), China, and was likely a contemporary of the Confucian scholar Mencius. Nevertheless, he is regarded as a famed Daoist thinker who rigorously rejected political power and social influence in favor of a life led by “free and easy” contemplation and simplicity.

In my view, a serious consideration of Zhuangzi’s teachings on the Dao are vital to understanding the gospel in and for Chinese culture. Zhuangzi is not a divine figure to be equated with Jesus Christ, nor are his teachings sacred like Scripture—but his sayings can be stepping stones for Chinese seekers to understand the New Testament and see Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

How Buddhism spread across China

One of Zhuangzi’s most enduring ideas is what a “true person” (真人) looks like. To him, this is one who lives in perfect unity with the Dao and rightly discerns every situation. Zhuangzi characterizes this individual as exhibiting “inward holiness and outward kingship” (内圣外王), in that their spiritual power gives them a majesty unmatched by those who govern by force.

When the Han Dynasty disintegrated in A.D. 220, scholars felt disenchanted with Confucianism, as it failed to hold the kingdom together. They began a new intellectual movement known as neo-Daoism or “mysterious learning” (玄学), mixing Confucian and Daoist teachings that emphasized the importance of cultivating Zhuangzi’s concept of the true person.

Leaders of this new school of thought turned to Buddhist ideas to flesh out their neo-Daoist thinking. Buddhism entered China during the Han Dynasty but failed to grow because it taught that followers should renounce family and society in favor of monastic life, which was antithetical to Chinese sensibilities at the time.

Zhuangzi’s ideas made Buddhism more appealing to the Chinese elite. For instance, he encouraged his followers to practice “fasting of the heart and mind” (心斋), language that resonated with Buddhist meditation practices. In this way, Zhuangzi’s teachings served as a link between Daoism and Buddhism, allowing the latter to flourish across China.

If scholars once used Zhuangzi’s teachings to introduce Buddhist thought to Chinese culture, can Christians use Zhuangzi to do the same for our faith? How might Chinese seekers who are steeped in Daoist influences view Jesus according to this lens? To answer this question, I’d like to compare three of Zhuangzi’s most famous sayings with three New Testament passages.

Born of the Spirit

In Zhuangzi’s worldview, transformation occurs beyond human reason. One of his most famous teachings is from a dream in which he becomes a butterfly, leading him to question if he could potentially be the opposite: a butterfly dreaming that it is a man.

Through the butterfly dream, Zhuangzi implies that there may be much more to nature than we typically perceive. There are mysteries beyond our present reality that we cannot fully fathom. The dynamic experience of waking up from one reality into another suggests that a “higher” level of consciousness can come about without warning, absent of our own effort.

When speaking to a Chinese person whose worldview is influenced by Daoism, Zhuangzi’s perspective on the mystery of transformation may help them understand how becoming a believer is not a self-driven but Spirit-initiated endeavor.

As John 3 relays, Jesus talks with Nicodemus about eternal matters, saying, “No one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” For Nicodemus, being “born again” seems illogical and impossible. But this birth is not one of body but of Spirit, Jesus responds.

The power of the Holy Spirit is far beyond that of the natural birth that Nicodemus was thinking about. The Spirit is like wind, blowing wherever it pleases (v. 8), and his work is not something we can manufacture by our own strength and intellect.

Cultivating spiritual fruit

To Zhuangzi, actions can become almost effortless when a person is connected to the Dao. In “The Secret to Caring for Life,” he writes about a master butcher who wields his knife instinctively. “After three years I no longer saw the whole ox,” the butcher says. “And now I go at it by Spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop, and Spirit moves where it wants.”

For Zhuangzi, what begins with effort slowly becomes as natural as breathing. The result is a seemingly supernatural capacity to do whatever it is one’s sense of vocation requires.

When introducing the gospel to Chinese seekers, Zhuangzi’s concept of effortless action (无为) may provide a deeper understanding of Paul’s teaching on the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22–25. We are to be rooted in the Spirit of God as opposed to the flesh, Paul writes, and since we live by the Spirit, we are to “keep in step” with the Spirit.

How do we contextualize this in the Chinese worldview?

Keeping in step with the Spirit refers to allowing the Holy Spirit to work in us daily as we abide in Christ and dwell on his Word. As we do so, there may be times in which displaying love, joy, peace, patience, and other fruit in our lives can become as effortless as Zhuangzi described, no matter how challenging our circumstances are.

Appraising worth

For Zhuangzi, seemingly insignificant things can be bearers of great worth. In a tale from “Free and Easy Wandering,” a critic complains about an ugly tree and compares it to Zhuangzi’s teachings: “Your words, too, are big and useless, and so everyone alike spurns them!"

“Why don’t you plant [the tree] in the Not-Even-Anything Village or the field of Broad-and-Boundless, relax and do nothing by its side, or lie down for a free and easy sleep under it? … If there’s no use for it, how can it come to grief or pain?” Zhuangzi responds wittily.

To Zhuangzi, the beauty of that “useless” tree is its natural capacity to stretch out and provide good in the world. He critiques humanity’s inclination to only attach value to things that are self-beneficial and asserts that there is inherent worth in all of creation.

When sharing about Christianity in Chinese culture, Zhuangzi’s story on finding worth in seemingly pointless items can serve as a springboard toward understanding Jesus’ description of the kingdom of God.

In the parable about the mustard seed in Matthew 13:31–32, Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed which, when fully grown, becomes a great tree, “the largest of garden plants … so that the birds come and perch in its branches.”

To Jesus, the beauty of a tiny mustard seed is its ability to grow into a great tree that provides a home for the birds. Here, the mustard seed reflects how the kingdom of God may seem to have humble beginnings but is unstoppable in its growth.

Encountering the Dao become flesh

In examining Zhuangzi’s teachings and how they can help seekers in Chinese culture understand the Christian faith, we see instances of how his teachings can point toward Christ—one who is fully human and fully divine, and the fulfillment of Zhuangzi’s idea of the true person.

Jesus is himself the Way, or the Dao: “In the beginning was the Dao, and the Dao was with God, and the Dao was God. … The Dao became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:1, 14; CUV).

Nevertheless, bearing witness to Christ through the language and values of another worldview does more than just communicate the gospel to a different culture. It also provides new ways for understanding the gospel in our own culture. In this way, Zhuangzi’s sayings may also provide non-Chinese Christians with a new perspective on God’s Word, like how early Christian leaders used Greco-Roman philosophies to illustrate their theological articulations.

As Augustine said, and Aquinas later agreed, “all truth is God’s truth”—since, wherever truth is found, God is the source (John 16:13). And every signpost of God’s truth, embedded in any culture, points toward Jesus as the hope of all nations (Matt. 12:21).

Easten Law is the assistant director of academic programs at Princeton Theological Seminary’s Overseas Ministries Study Center.

Previous versions of this piece were published on ChinaSource.

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Church Life

How to Make Friends at Church

Nadya Williams

It’s tough to plunge into a new congregation. Here’s how to get your head above water.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Pexels

Once, a man decided to attend religious services while visiting a new town. He went to the meeting location and made a bunch of new friends, just like that.

The man in question was the apostle Paul, and we learn this story of his visit to Philippi, including that friendly Sabbath, from Acts 16. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t like Paul in multiple key respects, so perhaps the story should be accompanied by a warning: results not typical. For most of us, making friends in a new church is hard.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past year because, last July, my family moved from Georgia to Ohio for my husband’s job. It was a difficult move; we have way too many books, it turns out, and they’re heavy. But far worse than shifting the books was leaving behind so many people we’ve known and loved for years—friends at church chief among them.

Leaving is only part of the trouble, however, and finding a new church isn’t the end of it either. Once you’ve settled on a local congregation, just how do you make friends?

It’s important to mention at this point that my husband and I, both socially awkward academics, are not as bold as Paul and have zero skill in small talk. I’m plenty familiar with the lives and writings of people who’ve been dead for two millennia or longer but often find living people rather harder to understand. And yet, being in community with them is a requirement of our faith (Heb. 10:25). God created us for community with himself and other believers, and church community is both a scene and source of spiritual growth. It’s also—eventually—lots of fun, even for the awkward like us.

The question, then, is how you get past that “eventually.” It isn’t easy. If you haven’t been that new person in a while, I want to remind you that it can be scary and uncomfortable. Feeling like the outsider was hard in kindergarten and third grade. It’s still hard, it turns out, when you’re a full-fledged grownup. And hard as it is for a family like mine to get settled in a new community, sitting in church alone, as theologian Dani Treweek eloquently reminds us, adds yet another layer of discomfort.

But this isn’t just a matter of hurt feelings. Not making friends at church can easily become a spiritual problem. I’ve encountered too many stories of people leaving churches (or quitting church altogether) because they struggled to make friends—because after weeks or even months of attendance, no one tried to get to know them or invited them for a meal.

In one case, a family attended a large church for about a year. They never formally joined, but they were there most Sundays. Then the dad got very sick. They missed church for a month and a half, but no one ever checked in. It seemed, they thought, as if no one even noticed they were gone.

It would be easy to blame congregations in stories like these for being too cliquish—or perhaps not attentive enough to people’s needs or insufficiently welcoming to newcomers. Sometimes the villain in these stories really is a communal callousness or lack of pastoral care.

Often, though, I think the situation is far more innocent. My example above involves a large church with multiple services. It’s easy for people to get lost in the crowd. Maybe someone noticed this family wasn’t there for a few weeks and simply assumed they had switched to another service. But also, remember that the family never became members, even after attending for a year. It’d be reasonable to think they’d just decided to go elsewhere, especially if they weren’t involved in church activities outside of Sunday mornings.

I tell this story as I turn to talking solutions because it points us to the most important thing to remember when you’re trying to make friends at church: In almost every case, everyone wants to make this happen—it’s just that it takes effort and commitment on all sides. Just as the old guard must remember how difficult it is to come into a new community, so newcomers must remember that initiation is their responsibility too. As we so easily tell children, be the friend that you want someone else to be to you.

And that’s really the only solution I have to offer, because it’s the only solution there is: You make friends at church by being a friend at church.

It’s what my husband, Dan, and I have tried to do here in Ohio, however imperfectly. We started getting to know others in the congregation not only on Sundays but outside church walls. We invited people over for meals at our house and to join us at activities like local concerts. We invited ourselves over to visit friends who were housebound for a time (e.g., while recovering from surgery).

And you know what? It turns out it can be just as intimidating for established church members to connect with newcomers as it is the other way around. By being willing to take the first step sometimes, we were able to jumpstart wonderful friendships with people who have warmly opened their hearts and homes to us in the months since.

Now, within this advice, I do have two more specific tips. First, for newcomers: Often, the easiest people to befriend in a church are retirees. Why? Because their schedules are a little less hectic than those of people in my life stage—busy working and raising children. They may also have a little (or a lot) more emotional bandwidth for playing and talking with energetic children, should you have some of those. While my concern each time we invite people into our home is that the children might not behave, our new friends whose kids are grown embrace the chaos with glee.

And second, for the old guard: Your church can make it easier for everyone to get to know each other by making plans during the week. Our new church has Wednesday night classes for kids and adults during much of the school year, and our old church fostered small groups that met throughout the week. For those who make it a point to be involved, these ministries are opportunities to make new friendships as much as they’re opportunities for discipleship.

Yet, ultimately, even with that institutional help, friendships take time and effort. You reap what you sow. But take heart: Beautiful friendships that will span decades may start at any moment—even with that simple lunch of tacos after church, right there in your messy dining room, strewn with art supplies from last night’s finger-painting adventures.

Nadya Williams is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church (Zondervan Academic, 2023) and the forthcoming Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (IVP Academic, 2024).

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News

Died: Jürgen Moltmann, Theologian of Hope

Daniel Silliman

A German soldier found by Christ in a prisoner of war camp, he became a renowned Christian scholar who taught that “God weeps with us so that we may someday laugh with him.”

Bernd Weissbrod/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images / edits by Rick Szuecs

Jürgen Moltmann, a theologian who taught that Christian faith is founded in the hope of the resurrection of the crucified Christ and that the coming kingdom of God acts upon human history out of the eschatological future, died on June 3 in Tübingen, Germany. He was 98.

Moltmann is widely regarded as one of the most important theologians since World War II. According to theologian Miroslav Volf, his work was “existential and academic, pastoral and political, innovative and traditional, readable and demanding, contextual and universal,” as he showed how the central themes of Christian faith spoke to the “fundamental human experiences” of suffering.

The World Council of Churches reports that Moltmann is “the most widely read Christian theologian” of the last 80 years. Religion scholar Martin Marty said his writings “inspire an uncertain Church” and “free people from the dead hands of dead pasts.”

Moltmann was not an evangelical, but many evangelicals engaged deeply with his work. The popular Christian author Philip Yancey called Moltmann one of his heroes and said in 2005 that he had “plowed through” nearly a dozen of his books.

Editors at Christianity Today were critical of Moltmann’s theology when they first grappled with it in the 1960s but still found themselves commending his work.

“We are brought up short,” G. C. Berkouwer wrote, “and reminded to think and to preach about the future in a biblical perspective. If this happens, all the theological talks have borne good fruit.”

Today, evangelicals who are ultimately critical of Moltmann’s views—disagreeing strongly with one aspect or another—have still found much to value and frequently encourage others to read him.

“Moltmann was a constant reference point for me,” Fred Sanders, a systematic theologian at Biola University, wrote on the social platform X. “Last year I taught a little bit from his book The Crucified God, and was struck by how powerful his voice still is for students. … And even for me, on the far side of abiding disagreements, re-reading Moltmann means encountering line after line of arresting ways of putting things.”

New Testament professor Wesley Hill said he disagreed with Moltmann “on what feels like every major Christian doctrine.” And yet “few theologians have moved and provoked and inspired me in the way he has. His work is all about the crucified and risen Jesus.”

Moltmann was born into a nonreligious family on April 8, 1926. His parents, he wrote in his autobiography, were adherents of a “simple life” movement that was committed to “plain living and high thinking.” They made their home in a settlement of like-minded people in a rural area outside Hamburg. Instead of going to church, the Moltmanns worked in their garden on Sunday mornings.

The family nonetheless sent their son to confirmation classes at the local state church when he was old enough. It was seen as a rite of passage. Moltmann recalled learning very little about Jesus, the Bible, or the Christian life. The pastor focused his lessons on trying to prove that Jesus wasn’t Jewish but actually Phoenician, and therefore Aryan, teaching the children the antisemitic theology promoted by the Nazis.

“It was complete nonsense,” Moltmann said.

At about the same time, in another rite of passage, Moltmann was sent to the Hitler Youth. While the uniforms and anthems made him feel very patriotic, he later recalled, he was bad at marching and hated the military drills. On one camping trip, he was crammed into a tent with ten boys. The experience left him with the strong sense that he enjoyed being alone.

Despite the rampant antisemitism of the time, Moltmann’s childhood hero was Albert Einstein, who was Jewish. Moltmann wanted to go to university and study math. That dream was interrupted by World War II.

At 16, Moltmann was drafted into the air force and assigned to defend Hamburg with an 88 mm anti-aircraft flak gun. He and a schoolmate named Gerhard Schopper were stationed on a platform set up on stilts in a lake. At night, they looked at the stars and learned the constellations.

Then the British attacked. They sent 1,000 planes in July 1943 to drop explosives and incendiaries on the city, starting a firestorm that melted metal, asphalt, and glass. Anything organic—wood, fabric, flesh—was consumed by a sea of fire. Temperatures rising above 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit sucked the air out of the streets so the city sounded, according to one survivor, “like an old church organ when someone is playing all the notes at once.”

The operation—which didn’t target military installations or munitions factories but “the morale of the enemy civil population”—was codenamed “Gomorrah,” after the biblical city destroyed by God in Genesis 19. Around 40,000 people were killed.

When the attack was over, Moltmann was floating in the lake, clinging to a shattered piece of wood from his exploded gun platform. His friend Schopper was dead.

He would later describe this as his first religious experience.

“As thousands of people died in the firestorm around me,” Moltmann said, “I cried out to God for the first time: Where are you?”

He didn’t get an answer that day. But two years later, he was captured on the frontlines and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Scotland. A chaplain gave him a New Testament with Psalms and he started reading Psalm 39 every night:

Hear my prayer, Lord,

listen to my cry for help;

do not be deaf to my weeping.

He read the Gospel of Mark and found himself deeply drawn to Jesus. The crucifixion undid him.

“I didn’t find Christ. He found me,” Moltmann later said. “There, in the Scottish prisoner of war camp, in the dark pit of my soul, Jesus sought me and found me. ‘He came to seek that which was lost’ (Luke 19:10), and so he came to me.”

When he returned to Germany at 22—the country in ruins—he went to school to study theology. The Nazis were pushed out of the universities during the American-led reconstruction, including the University of Göttingen theologian Emanuel Hirsch, who would hum the Nazi national anthem between classes and once claimed that Adolf Hitler was the greatest Christian statesman in the history of the world.

At Göttingen, Moltmann studied under people who aligned with the Confessing Church and taught the theology of Karl Barth. He wrote a dissertation about a 17th-century French Calvinist, focusing on the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints.

While at school, Moltmann fell in love with another theology student, Elisabeth Wendel. They earned their doctorates together and got married in a civil ceremony in Switzerland in 1952.

After graduating, Moltmann was sent to pastor a church in a remote village in North Rhine-Westphalia. He taught a confirmation class of “50 wild boys,” and in the winter made house calls on skis. People asked him to bring herring, margarine, and other food from the store when he came.

“The first question I was asked everywhere was whether I believed in the Devil,” Moltmann later recalled. He taught people they could drive the Devil away by reciting the Nicene Creed. He wasn’t convinced they listened.

Moltmann’s second church was a challenge too. He was sent to a small village in the north of the country, near Bremen. There were rats in the basement of the parsonage, mice in the kitchen, and bats and owls in the attic. About 100 people attended church—but not all at once, and not regularly. On Sunday mornings, the young minister would wait at the window, wondering if anyone was going to be there.

He earned some respect from the farmers for his skill playing the card game Skat, though, and he learned to preach sermons that connected to people. If the older farmers rolled their eyes while he was talking, Moltmann learned, his theology had gotten too detached from their real-life concerns.

“Unless academic theology continually turns back to this theology of the people, it becomes abstract and irrelevant,” he later wrote. “l was not totally suited to be a pastor, but l was happy to have experienced the entire height and depth of human life: children and aged, men and women, healthy and sick, birth and death, etc. l would have been happy to have remained a theologian/pastor.”

In 1957, Moltmann left pastoral ministry to teach theology. He lectured on a range of topics but grew especially interested in the history of Christian hope for the kingdom of God.

At the same time, he started to engage with the work of a Marxist philosopher named Ernst Bloch. Moltmann wrote several critical reviews of Bloch’s books but found his ideas stimulating. Bloch argued life was moving dialectically toward a final utopia. In his three-volume magnum opus, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope), he made the case for revolutionary hope, claiming that Marxism was guided by a mystical impulse of anticipation for an ultimate fulfillment.

Though he was an atheist, Bloch frequently quoted Scripture. He said he was attempting to articulate the “eschatological conscience that came into the world through the Bible.”

Moltmann noted that while many theologians had written about faith and love, there was little in the Protestant tradition about hope. Theology had “let go of its own theme,” he said, and he decided to take up the task.

He started teaching on the topic first at the University of Bonn and then at the University of Tübingen, where he would spend the remainder of his career.

Moltmann published Theologie der Hoffnung (Theology of Hope) in 1964. It was met with intense interest. The book went through six printings in two years and was translated into multiple foreign languages. It appeared in English for the first time in 1967 and earned enough attention from theologians to attract the notice of The New York Times.

In a front page story in March 1968, the newspaper reported that debates over the trendy “death of God” theology had been replaced by a discussion of the 41-year-old Moltmann’s idea that God “acts upon history out of the future.” Moltmann was quoted as saying that “from first to last, and not merely in the epilogue, Christianity is eschatology.”

The newspaper marveled that this “theology of hope” was founded on belief in the resurrection, “which many other theologians now regard as a myth.”

Some critics at the time, however, worried this emphasis on eschatology overshadowed the work of Christ on the cross. They said Moltmann’s focus on final things ignored or even downplayed the importance of the crucifixion.

Moltmann came to think there was something to that criticism during a symposium on Theology of Hope at Duke University in April 1968. During one of the sessions, the theologian Harvey Cox ran into the room and shouted, “Martin Luther King has been shot.”

The gathering quickly disbanded as theologians scrambled to get home amid reports of riots across the country. But the students at Duke—who hadn’t seemed to care at all about the theology of hope—gathered for a spontaneous vigil in the school’s quad. They mourned King’s death for six days. On the last day, the white students were joined by Black students from other schools, and together they sang the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.”

Moltmann, moved by the transformative power of suffering, started to work on his second book, Der gekreuzigte Gott (The Crucified God). It was published in 1972 and came out in English two years later.

“Christian identity can be understood only as an act of identification with the crucified Christ,” Moltmann wrote. “The ‘religion of the cross’ … does not elevate and edify in the usual sense, but scandalizes; and most of all it scandalizes one’s ‘co-religionists’ in one’s own circle. But by this scandal, it brings liberation into a world which is not free.”

Moltmann united the two ideas—Christ’s suffering and Christians’ hope—and that became the core of his theology. He taught that people should “believe in the resurrection of the crucified Christ and live in the light of his reality and future.”

Or more simply: “God weeps with us so that we may someday laugh with him.”

Moltmann retired in 1994 but continued to work with graduate students for many years after. When his wife died in 2016, he wrote a final book on death and resurrection.

Moltmann is survived by four daughters.

- More from Daniel Silliman

News

Wire Story

Growth in Faith-Based Higher Ed Prompts Colleges to Share Innovations

Adelle M. Banks - Religion News Service

Leaders in evangelical higher ed have joined a new commission to collaborate around recent innovations and adaptations.

Pearl / Lightstock

A prominent association of American colleges and universities has created a new commission of religious schools whose aim will be to share with their nonreligious counterparts recent successes in the areas of access and affordability and the innovations that have led to growth in recent years.

The Commission on Faith-based Colleges and Universities, recently announced by the American Council on Education (ACE), a lobbying group for about 1,600 college and university leaders, plans to launch with meetings on Tuesday in Washington.

The new commission comes after data from the National Center for Education Statistics showed that religious schools grew by 82 percent from 1980 to 2020, while the national average was 57 percent.

There has been growing interest in collaboration between religious and secular schools in recent years. In 2019, the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU) Presidents Conference hosted leaders of Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, and Protestant colleges and universities for the first time.

Last year, ACE hosted a conference on religious institutions that included presidents of Latter-day Saint, Catholic and Jewish universities.

Six of the 13 schools whose presidents are members of the new commission represent CCCU schools, including George Fox University and Taylor University. Other institutions involved include The Catholic University of America, Pepperdine University, Yeshiva University, the University of Notre Dame and Dillard University.

“ACE is honored to support and convene this important commission,” said Ted Mitchell, the organization’s president, in a May 29 statement. “Faith-based institutions connect feelings of belief and belonging with intellectual expression and considering the social, economic, and environmental challenges facing us today, we can ill afford for religious universities to be hidden.”

The commission will be co-chaired by Shirley Hoogstra, president of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, and Clark Gilbert, commissioner of the Latter-day Saints’ Church Educational System.

Gilbert said schools in his group, which includes Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, grew from 60,000 students in 2020 to close to 150,000 in 2023. That growth was driven in part by its BYU-Pathway Worldwide, an online program at BYU-Idaho and Ensign College in Salt Lake City.

“We had to innovate for first-generation, low-income adult learners,” he said of the program. “It led us to the 90-credit bachelor’s degree, which made a lot more sense for adult learners.”

With financial support from the Mormon church, the program costs $81 per credit hour, allowing students, who are not charged for religion credits, to earn a 90-credit degree for less than $6,200 in three years.

Hoogstra pointed to initiatives at Southeastern University in Lakeland, Florida, that likewise offer lower-cost access to higher education.

Southeastern, affiliated with the Assemblies of God, has reduced most of its requirements for its courses of study in fields such as psychology, business, and ministry to 120 credit hours, which can include off-site study at evangelical churches in 44 states and some online learning. At those sites, students seeking bachelor’s degrees pay $8,486 a year, or a total tuition of about $34,000 for four years. Tuition for a year on its traditional campus is $30,432.

“Too many institutions are looking at the dollar amount, and they’re not looking at the time and effort,” said Michael Steiner, Southeastern’s vice president of innovation of his school. “And what we found is that when you focus on the time it takes a student to graduate, you naturally decrease the cost.”

In general, CCCU’s analysis of national tuition costs found that its schools’ average tuition is $30,746, compared with $39,940 at a private four-year institution.

“You might come in for the price point, but you stay for the purpose,” said Hoogstra.

In a recent presentation, Hoogstra said of the 4,700 degree-granting institutions, 33 percent are public, 43 percent are private, 21 percent are private and religiously affiliated (such as Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal, and Presbyterian) and 3 percent are CCCU members and affiliates.

She said CCCU schools and other religiously affiliated institutions are “confident and unapologetic about the fact that faith helps people have meaning and purpose.”

Gilbert said ACE recognizes that some innovation motivated by a religious mission can be adapted by secular counterparts who see benefits that may or may not be related to faith.

In addition to access to education, Gilbert said college presidents have told him they’d like to collaborate on issues of accreditation and religious freedom.

The formation of the commission comes at a time when some colleges and universities have faced closures or been put on probation as their accreditation has been in question. Hoogstra said that denominational support can help keep troubled institutions alive. Presidents of schools related to a particular faith can rely on denominational leaders to brainstorm or offer advice when facing financial problems.

“Is there a safety net? I would say yes,” she said.

To counter problems with accreditation, Gilbert said creativity is a necessity.

“The message we try to share with other religious peers is you can’t just be in this old higher ed model, where tuition goes up and up and up,” he said. “You have to innovate, you have to change. Use your mission as a source of change, not being an imperative to being stuck in an old model.”

- More from Adelle M. Banks - Religion News Service

News

Wire Story

Southern Baptists Pledged to Launch an Online Database of Abusers. It’s Still Empty.

Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

Lack of funding and liability concerns have stalled abuse reform efforts.

Jae C. Hong / AP

A volunteer Southern Baptist task force charged with implementing abuse reforms in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination will end its work next week without a single name published on a database of abusers.

The task force’s report marks the second time a proposed database for abusive pastors has been derailed by denominational apathy, legal worries, and a desire to protect donations to the Southern Baptist Convention’s mission programs.

Leaders of the SBC’s Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force (ARITF) say a lack of funding, concerns about insurance, and other unnamed difficulties hindered the group’s work.

“The process has been more difficult than we could have imagined,” the task force said in a report published Tuesday. “And in truth, we made less progress than we desired due to the myriad obstacles and challenges we encountered in the course of our work.”

To date, no names appear on the Ministry Check website designed to track abusive pastors, despite a mandate from Southern Baptists to create the database. The committee has also found no permanent home or funding for abuse reforms, meaning that two of the task force’s chief tasks remain unfinished.

Because of liability concerns about the database, the task force set up a separate nonprofit to oversee the Ministry Check website. That new nonprofit, known as the Abuse Response Committee (ARC), has been unable to publish any names because of objections raised by SBC leaders.

“At present, ARC has secured multiple affordable insurance bids and successfully completed the vetting and legal review of nearly 100 names for inclusion on Ministry Check at our own expense with additional names to be vetted pending the successful launch of the website,” the task force said in its report.

Josh Wester, the North Carolina pastor who chairs ARITF, said the Abuse Response Committee—whose leaders include four task force members—could independently publish names to Ministry Check in the future but wants to make a good-faith effort to address the Executive Committee’s concerns.

Task force leaders say they raised $75,000 outside of the SBC to vet the initial names of abusers. That list includes names of sexual offenders who were either convicted of abuse in a criminal court or who have had a civil judgment against them.

“To date, the SBC has contributed zero funding toward the vetting of names for Ministry Check,” according to a footnote in the task force report.

Earlier this year, the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission designated $250,000 toward abuse reform to be used by the ARITF. Wester hopes those funds will be made available to ARC for the Ministry Check site. The SBC’s two mission boards pledged nearly $4 million to assist churches in responding to abuse but have said none of that money can be given to ARC.

The lack of progress on reforms has abuse survivor and activist Christa Brown shaking her head.

“Why can’t a billion-dollar organization come up with the resources to do this?” asked Brown, who for years ran a list of convicted Baptist abusers at a website, StopBaptistPredators.org, which aggregated stories about cases of abuse.

Brown sees the lack of progress on reforms as part of a larger pattern in the SBC. While church messengers and volunteers like those on the ARITF want reform and work hard to address the issue of reforms, there’s no help from SBC leaders or institutions. Instead, she said, SBC leaders do just enough to make it look like they care, without any real progress.

“The institution does not care,” she said. “If it did care it would put money and resources behind this. And it did not do that. And it hasn’t for years.”

SBC leaders have long sought to shield the denomination and especially the hundreds of millions of dollars given to Southern Baptist mission boards and other entities from liability for sexual abuse. The 12.9 million-member denomination has no direct oversight of its churches or entities, which are governed by trustees, making it a billion-dollar institution that, for all intents and purposes, does not exist outside of a few days in June when the SBC annual meeting is in session.

As a result, abuse reform has been left in the hands of volunteers such as those on the task force, who lacked the authority or the resources to complete their task.

As part of its report, the ARITF recommends asking local church representatives, known as messengers, at the SBC annual meeting if they still support abuse reforms such as the Ministry Check database. The task force also recommends that the SBC Executive Committee be assigned the job of figuring out how to implement those reforms—and that messengers authorize funding to get the job done.

Church messengers will have a chance to vote on those recommendations during the SBC annual meeting, scheduled for June 11-12 in Indianapolis.

The task force’s report does include at least one success. During the annual meeting next week, messengers will receive copies of new training materials, known as “The Essentials,” designed to help them prevent and respond to abuse.

This is the second time in the past 16 years that attempts to create a database of abusive Southern Baptist pastors failed. In 2007, angered at news reports of abusive pastors in their midst and worried their leaders were doing nothing about it, Southern Baptists asked their leaders to look into creating a database of abusive pastors to make sure no abuser could strike twice.

A year later, during an annual meeting in Indianapolis, SBC leaders said no. Such a list was deemed “impossible.” Instead, while denouncing abuse and saying churches should not tolerate it, they said Baptists should rely on national sex offender registries.

Because there is no denominational list of abusive pastors, local church members have to fend for themselves when responding to abuse, said Dominique and Megan Benninger, former Southern Baptists who run Baptistaccountability.org, a website that links to news stories about Baptist abusers.

The couple started the website after the former pastor at their SBC church in Pennsylvania was ousted when the congregation learned of his prior sexual abuse conviction. Before long, he was preaching at another church.

“We were just, like, how does this happen?” Megan Benninger said.

When the couple posted on Facebook about their former pastor, leaders of their home church reprimanded them, telling them in an email that they should not have made their concerns public. Not long afterward, the couple decided to set up a website that would collect publicly available information about abusive pastors.

“Our goal is to share information so people can decide whether a church is safe or not,” said Dominique Benninger.

To set up their site, the Benningers modified an e-commerce website design so that instead of sharing information about products, it shares information about abusive pastors. The website became a database of third-party information, which is protected by the same federal laws that protect other interactive computer services, like Facebook.

The Benningers don’t do any investigations but instead aggregate publicly available information to make it easier for church members to find out about abusers. That kind of information is needed, they say, so church members can make informed decisions.

The Benningers have recently placed a hold on adding new names to their database while Megan Benninger is being treated for cancer. They wonder who will pick up the slack if the SBC’s proposed database fails. They also are skeptical about claims that having a database would undermine local church autonomy—which is a key SBC belief.

“You are just warning them that there’s a storm coming,” said Megan Benninger. “How is that interfering with anyone’s autonomy?”

Members of the abuse task force say the denomination has made progress on abuse reforms in recent years but more remains to be done.

“We believe the SBC is ready to see the work of abuse reform result in lasting change,” the task force said in its report. “With the task force’s work coming to an end, we believe our churches need help urgently.”

Brown, author of Baptistland, an account of the abuse she experienced growing up in a Baptist church and her years of activism for reform, is skeptical that any real change will happen. Instead of making promises and not keeping them, she said, SBC leaders should just admit abuse reform is not a priority.

“They might as well say, this is not worth a dime—and we are not going to do anything,” she said. “That would be kinder.”

- More from Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

Theology

What Silicon Valley’s New Ethical Thinking Gets Right—and Wrong

Maaike E. Harmsen

Effective altruism and longtermism are all the rage these days. How should Christians engage?

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

Former cryptocurrency trade executive Ryan Salame was sentenced last week for federal financial crimes he committed while working for FTX. The company’s billionaire founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was sentenced months ago for engaging in “one of the largest financial frauds in history.” This case is making headlines and sparking long-term conversations in the burgeoning field of tech ethics.

Bankman-Fried’s name and story are inextricably connected to the new ethical thinking of Silicon Valley, which is increasingly influenced by “longtermism”—the idea that positively influencing the future is the key moral priority of our time—and “effective altruism,” which dictates that if you want to do good, you should do it as effectively as possible.

The most prominent thought leader of these principles is William MacAskill (What We Owe the Future, 2022). MacAskill taught Bankman-Fried during his time at Oxford, advising him that his acquired talents would be most effectively maximized in business and philanthropy. And so, citing longtermism and effective altruism as reasons for founding FTX, Bankman-Fried’s company earned him trust and billions of dollars—some of which went to charitable causes while much eventually ended up in his own pocket.

Not only did Bankman-Fried’s focus on long-term moral goals eventually eclipse the ethics of his immediate personal actions, but it appears thought leaders like MacAskill reportedly ignored repeated warnings about Bankman-Fried. Why? As Charlotte Alter wrote for Time magazine, “For a group of philosophers who had spent their lives contemplating moral tradeoffs and weighing existential risks, the warnings about Bankman-Fried may have presented a choice between embracing a big donor with questionable ethics or foregoing millions of dollars they believed could boost their nascent movement to help save the future of humanity.”

It seems one of the weaknesses of this new ethical thinking is an age-old “ends justify the means” mentality. Having tunnel vision about future big-picture ethical goals can often lend itself to unethical methods in the short term. It’s for this and other reasons that some are sounding the alarm about this emerging approach to ethics—including intellectual historian Émile P. Torres, for whom effective altruism and longtermism are “toxic ideologies” with “worrying dystopian tendencies.” Perhaps, he proposes, “Silicon Valley’s favorite ideas for changing the world for the better actually threaten to make it much, much worse.”

Even still, effective altruism and longtermism groups are sprouting up in universities across the country and seem to especially resonate with young college students who are eager to champion charitable causes and make a difference in the world. As Benjamin Vincent observed in a previous piece for CT, the “apocalyptic hope” of metamodernism is quickly replacing the cynical stance of postmodernism as the new cultural mood of the next generation of youth.

Longtermism and effective altruism work well together, as they are both led by a pragmatic utilitarianism—in which ethical decisions are calculated based on providing future happiness for as many people as possible. For example, donating money to prevent epidemics makes a lot of sense since it has the potential to save a high number of human lives. Likewise, combating climate change and avoiding nuclear war are effective philanthropic outlets.

These principles are becoming increasingly popular in business and among tech industry leaders, including Elon Musk, who called MacAskill’s work “a close match” for his philosophy, which includes outspoken pronatalism. In 2021, Musk offered to sell at least $6 billion worth of Tesla stock if the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) could give a detailed account of how that money would be spent on helping hungry people on the planet. But instead of providing specific data, WFP’s executive director Cindy McCain initially responded with a relational and ideological appeal.

It was like two ships sailing past each other in the night: Musk, an engineer, who wanted hard data to solve a tangible problem, and public officials who wanted to talk about the ideals and motivations behind the problem. As many people on X urged him to donate the $6 billion anyway, Musk did donate $5.7 billion of his Tesla shares to an unknown charity in the following weeks.

This new ethical thinking ultimately centers on the pursuit of happiness and well-being, which invokes a moral responsibility to actively engage in a collective struggle against environmental disasters, disease, poverty, war, and oppression. Given the comprehensive calculations needed for such large-scale humanitarian projects, it is not surprising that this approach seems to be most popular among those with a background in the hard sciences, including engineering, technology, and other fields that focus on efficiently utilizing time and money.

For Christians, there is much to applaud and to criticize. On the one hand, tech leaders are seeing future risks and are willing to employ their own resources to help mitigate them. On the other hand, their motivations and solutions are informed by a techno-optimism that often reduces the world’s problems to technical issues requiring technical solutions. In doing so, they end up neglecting the underlying causes behind some of these global concerns—which can’t be fixed by more money or better technology but only by a change of the human heart.

Take, for instance, Bill Gates’s recent book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster (2021). This software engineer sees climate change as a physical problem and offers practical solutions to fix it: Let’s fund research and development for innovation on cleaner and more efficient technology, and let industry and markets work together with governments to implement this. He focuses on upscaling innovation early to ensure such technology will become economically viable.

But what he fails to mention are the many unseen and systemic drivers behind climate change, including unbridled consumerism in the West, the social trend of “keeping up with the Joneses,” the pension funds and investments in fossil industries aimed at keeping shareholders happy, and national governments that continue to subsidize fossil fuels to please their populations.

Or consider how tech leaders approach the possible threats that generative artificial intelligence (AI) poses to humanity. At The AI Summit London last year, tech leaders drafted an open letter asking to pause AI development due to its long-term risks. But what was never mentioned were the existing dangers of internet algorithms making us addicted to our screens and creating an anxious generation of youth. The future risk of AI was limited to its computational force, not its potential in the hands of social media giants eager to keep us hooked on their platforms.

Still, there are many elements for believers to admire in this way of thinking. Christian ethics also takes the well-being of others into account, sometimes even at the expense of our own happiness. And our worldview should also be future-focused: God himself promised the Israelites that their children and children’s children would be blessed by their obedience to his commands—or cursed by their acts of unrighteousness (Ex. 34:7).

These principles also correspond with the biblical idea that God calls us to be good stewards. When Jesus returns to renew creation, we will be judged according to our “works” (Rev. 20:12), including our treatment of people and the earth. In fact, this outlook is a helpful corrective to the tendency of some believers to focus on the urgent task of evangelism (the Great Commission) at the expense of God’s first command to humanity: that we “be fruitful and increase in number,” “fill the earth and subdue it,” and “work it and take care of it” (Gen. 1:28; 2:15).

Longtermism and effective altruism both bring up great questions for Christians to discuss and to seek scripturally sound answers, such as how our eschatological views impact the calculus of Christian ethics. On a practical level, these can also provide avenues for helpful dialogue with our fellow citizens about which policies best serve the well-being of humanity. In this way, effective altruists and longtermists can help Christians reflect on what we should stand for and what we are willing to do to better our world—both now and in the future.

We can also admire the lengths some go to in advancing this cause. MacAskill promotes giving away 10 percent of income to charitable causes, volunteering one’s services, and choosing jobs that will make a difference in the world. Likewise, Rutger Bregman finances a school for “moral ambition” to encourage young professionals to not simply choose a high paying job and give money to charity but to make a morally grounded difference in a role that best fits their talent.

But, as with anything, there can be a dark side to this ideology—especially when we trace it back to its source. Peter Singer, one of the most popular and influential ethicists of this century, was an early founder of effective altruism. He’s also an atheist who has made strange ethical arguments in the past, including placing animal rights on equal (or higher) footing as human rights. And although most wouldn’t subscribe to Singer’s more fringe beliefs, we must remember that the root of this new ethical thinking is grounded in a deeper philosophy of life—a largely secular worldview that lends itself well to a more sophisticated form of hedonism, where the ultimate purpose of human life is the pursuit of happiness.

Effective altruism, which seeks to focus all our resources on maximizing or optimizing our positive impact—on making as many people happy as possible in the far future—can also be at odds with the ministry principles of Jesus. According to this standard, leaving 99 people to save the 1 makes no sense. And neither does wasting expensive perfume at the feet of our Savior. Did the Samaritan pause to consider whether caring for his beat-up neighbor by the roadside was the most effective use of his time and money?

Christian philosophers have long criticized the tendency of post-industrial societies to perceive life’s problems, and their solutions, as merely technical. In The Technological Society (1964), Jacques Ellul warns that when we rely too heavily on technology’s capacity to fulfill humanity’s future happiness, “ideas and theories no longer dominate, but rather the power of production.”

That is not to say that productivity is unimportant. Christians can and should participate in the technical calculation of global problems and find effective, sustainable, long-term solutions. And we must also avoid over-spiritualizing by reducing everything to the spiritual dimension, where soul-saving becomes our only goal in this life. In short, whenever we reduce ethics to any one dimension—whether technical or spiritual—we can easily lose sight of all the others.

Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper famously proclaimed, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” He taught that all life is under common grace, and that Christians should participate in every field of inquiry. This premise was furthered by his intellectual heir, Herman Dooyeweerd, who developed a holistically Christian view of life in service to our Creator—believing Christian scholars should boldly plant “the banner of Christ’s kingship” in every field of study.

Longtermism and effective altruism can be shared moral grounds for us to appeal to our fellow citizens to secure the future well-being of our children, the earth, and society. But an ethical system that is solely defined by this outlook can lack a more holistic vision of life. We must seek a well-rounded wisdom that extends beyond the merely logistical and technical aspects of complex problems, such as global hunger, and that weighs matters closer to the heart of such issues.

As believers, we are accountable for all our actions (2 Cor. 5:10) and we must not grow weary of doing good to all (Gal. 6:9–10). Still, as fallen humans in a fallen world, we possess a certain humility in what we believe we can achieve this side of heaven—along with an innate dependence on our Creator. For although we may fail in our efforts, we are upheld by the grace of God. It is for this reason that Christ’s yoke is easy, and his burden is light (Matt. 11:30).

Maaike E. Harmsen is a Reformed theologian, preacher, writer, and part-time city councilor in the Netherlands.

- More from Maaike E. Harmsen

Books

Nominate a Book for the Christianity Today Book Awards

CT Editors

Instructions for publishers.

Pixabay / Pexels

Dear publishers and authors,

Each year, Christianity Today honors a set of outstanding books encompassing a variety of subjects and genres. The CT Book Awards will be announced in December at christianitytoday.com. They also will be featured prominently in the January/February 2025 issue of CT and promoted in several CT newsletters. (In addition, publishers will have the opportunity to participate in a marketing promotion organized by CT’s marketing team, complete with site banners and paid Facebook promotion.)

Here are this year’s awards categories:

1. Apologetics/Evangelism

2a. Biblical Studies

2b. Bible and Devotional

3a. Children

3b. Young Adults

4. Christian Living/Spiritual Formation

5. The Church/Pastoral Leadership

6. Culture, Poetry, and the Arts

7. Fiction

8. History/Biography

9. Marriage, Family, and Singleness

10. Missions/The Global Church

11. Politics and Public Life

12a. Theology (popular)

12b. Theology (academic)

*In addition, CT will be naming a Book of the Year, chosen from the entire pool of nominees by a panel of CT editors.

Nominations:

To be eligible for nomination, a book must be published between November 1, 2023 and October 31, 2024. We are looking for scholarly and popular-level works, and everything in between. A diverse panel of scholars, pastors, and other informed readers will evaluate the books.

Authors and publishers can nominate as many books as they wish, and each nominee can be submitted in multiple categories. For larger publishers (those with 50 or more employees), there is a $40 entry fee for each nomination (defined as each title submitted in each category). For smaller publishers (those with fewer than 50 employees), the entry fee is $20 per nomination. And for self-published authors, the entry fee is $10 per nomination.

To enter your nominations, click here to access the submission form. Download the form, fill it out as instructed, and email a copy (along with PDF versions of each nominee) to bookawards@christianitytoday.com. (In the box marked “total submissions,” please indicate the number of nominated books and give an estimate of the resulting nomination fees, based on the payment scale mentioned above. We will verify these totals, and begin sending payment invoices in early July.)

Finalist books:

If your book is chosen as one of the four finalists in any category, we will contact you and ask that you send a copy of the book directly to the judges assigned to that category. We will provide mailing addresses for each judge.

Deadline:

The deadline for submitting nominations is Friday, July 19, 2024.

Any questions about any aspect of the process? Email us at bookawards@christianitytoday.com.

Thank you!

—Christianity Today editors

- More from CT Editors

News

For Sale: Christian Ministry Headquarters

Daniel Silliman

Evangelical organizations including Wycliffe, CT, and Lifeway are giving up their buildings and developing new models for remote work.

Wycliffe Bible Translators headquarters in Orlando, Florida.

Wycliffe Bible Translators

Wycliffe Bible Translators’ building is 167,000 square feet of class-A office space, with windows looking out over palm trees, golf course grass, and a shimmering blue lake that appears to be a near-perfect circle. The headquarters is about 10 miles from the Orlando airport in the Lake Nona area, sitting on 272 lush acres that include wetlands filled with Florida wildlife, an RV park, an activity center, a welcome center, corporate-quality lodging, a clinic, and more land that could be developed in the future.

And all of this could be yours.

From John Wycliffe Boulevard to Great Commission Way, the global home base of the 82-year-old Bible translation organization is for sale. The property was listed in mid-February. Its real estate agents called it “an unrivaled opportunity for a full campus user looking for their own headquarters within the metro area.”

Selling all this is a matter of stewardship, according to John Chesnut, Wycliffe’s president and CEO. The ministry doesn’t need the space and wasn’t using it to full capacity.

Chesnut is a little concerned, though, that people will hear that and think Wycliffe is struggling financially or has fallen on hard times, when that isn’t actually the case.

“It’s the strongest we’ve ever been in our history,” he told CT. “It’s just been a huge season of blessing. We’re accelerating new translations, engaging or starting with new partners, faster than we ever have.”

In 2023, Wycliffe greenlit 523 new Bible translation projects, he added. The ministry, which has helped translate more than 700 languages since it was founded in 1942, currently has about 1,700 active projects.

According to Chesnut, the bulk of the proceeds from the sale of the property will go to fund more Bibles.

“How do we increase project funding in order to say yes to more and more projects around the world?” he said. “Focusing on vision and mission, we have to look at all things across our budget and how we work, and we had to look at this fixed asset.”

Wycliffe’s headquarters was designed for about 800 people. Wycliffe has about 3,000 staff globally, but only about 300 are in the Orlando area. And many of those workers don’t come into the office every day.

Remote work was common at Wycliffe even before the COVID-19 pandemic, when all nonessential activity in Florida was restricted for two and a half months. Since June 2020, however, more of the staff have found they prefer working from home, so the building has remained mostly empty.

“On a high day, we’re utilizing maybe 15 percent,” Chesnut told CT. “It’s just the new work rhythm.”

A lot of office workers are discovering that new rhythm. A recent study of commercial real estate found that nearly 20 percent of all office space in the United States was vacant at the end of 2023. Rates are even higher in the Midwest, with 22 percent vacant in Indianapolis, 23 percent in Chicago, and above 25 percent in Columbus and Cincinnati. The rate of new construction across the country is down more than half.

Some of this can be attributed to changes in employment rates. The total number of Americans with office jobs dropped last year from 36 million to 35.2 million. But by far the biggest change has been the increase of hybrid work and the growing acceptance of remote-first employment.

The shift is very visible at evangelical nonprofits. Christianity Today, for example, has increased its staff by more than 25 percent since 2021. Currently, however, less than half of its 86 employees live in Illinois, and only 22 live within easy driving distance of the ministry’s longtime headquarters in the western suburbs of Chicago.

“We discovered we were perfectly capable of thriving as a media ministry with a distributed team,” CT president and CEO Timothy Dalrymple said. “In fact, being distributed brought a lot of advantages. It expanded our relational networks and our engagement with different regions and cultures. We were no longer monolithically Midwestern. We could hire the best people we could find, regardless of location.”

CT sold its office in March. The 23,000-square-foot building, which has housed the magazine and other parts of the ministry since 1976—when CT relocated from Washington, DC—will become a veterinary hospital.

CT owned the building debt-free, so the sale was not motivated by financial concerns but cultural ones.

“Our old building served us well for decades, but it did not present an attractive work environment for today’s team,” Dalrymple said.

CT will rent a 5,000-square-foot space on Hale Street in downtown Wheaton, Illinois, starting September 1. The new space has an open office area, several meeting rooms, a small media studio, and a place to host some gatherings.

Dalrymple expects 20 to 25 people to work there day to day. But for the majority of the staff, the foreseeable future will be remote. CT employees will communicate over Zoom and Slack and other apps, gathering in person only a few times a year.

Cultivating ministry culture is perhaps the trickiest part of selling your headquarters and going remote, according to Ben Mandrell, CEO of Lifeway Christian Resources.

The Southern Baptist ministry sold its building in downtown Nashville in 2021. Now, it has a new building in the suburb of Brentwood, which doesn’t have traditional offices but is designed instead as a “teaming space,” where people who mostly work on their own can come together to collaborate, create, and plan.

Lifeway staff clearly prefer this approach to office space, according to Mandrell, but he personally struggled with the change.

“It was really hard for me,” he said. “I like to see people. I like to look in their eyes. I like walk-around management.”

Management styles have to change when people aren’t all in the same physical space, Mandrell has found. Supervisors have to learn that the time that someone is working matters a lot less than the output. They have to trust people to know the best way to get their work done.

Building trust and developing team culture has become the main focus of Lifeway’s twice-a-year team meetings. Initially, the leadership used the all-staff gatherings to convey information to employees—talking about new projects, new products, health benefits, and any changes to company policies. Now the in-person events are for celebration.

“We play a lot of silly games onstage and celebrate people,” Mandrell said. “We have this huge awards ceremony at the end where we give away $2,000 and time off to 20 people per year. They have to stand onstage while we read stuff about them that is very affirming, written by the people they work with. When we read their names, the whole place just erupts, and that’s become our kind of culture.”

It has taken a few years, however, for Lifeway to figure out this new approach to building camaraderie and community—and to figure out what it means to work together while apart.

It has taken a while too for supporters and donors to see that this change is not a sign of crisis. Some people’s first reaction when a ministry headquarters goes up for sale—in downtown Nashville, suburban Chicago, or the Lake Nona area of Orlando—is to assume a financial catastrophe is breaking into public view. But the leaders of these evangelical ministries say it’s just the way the world of work is changing. It’s an effort to be innovative and creative and to better fulfill their mission.

“People are always alarmist,” Mandrell said. “I had to tell a lot of people, ‘It’s not a fire sale.’ It looks like a fire sale on the outside. On the inside, it looks like mission focus.”

- More from Daniel Silliman

Church Life

Let the Anxious Children Sing to Me

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

New worship music offers today’s young believers a wider range of emotions and greater spiritual depth.

Kairospanama / Pexels

Kids need more from worship music than dance motions, silly lyrics, and singsong melodies. Musicians like Keith and Kristyn Getty and Shane & Shane are building a body of songs with theological depth and musical simplicity to help disciple young believers.

“Jesus Calms the Storm (Hymn for Anxious Little Hearts),” a recent single released by the Gettys in collaboration with Sandra McCracken and Joni Eareckson Tada, sets clear, profound words for moments of worry or uncertainty:

When my heart is filled with fear
Like a stormy sky
Jesus says, “Be not afraid”
He is at my side

There’s a rock where I can go
Keeps me safe and this I know
Deep within my troubled soul
Jesus calms the storm

For Keith Getty, who produced the single, the psalms offer children something that nothing else can: both the affirmation they long for and hope for what lies beyond the present.

“We can say what we feel, what we know about God, and move through to where we can look beyond our circumstances,” Getty told CT. “Not to resolve it like a Disney happy ending or a bumper sticker slogan but toward something hopeful.”

Kids’ mental health is front and center these days, with best-selling books by Jonathan Haidt and Abigail Shrier exploring contributing factors to childhood anxiety and emotional struggles on the rise among young people. Concerning trends like increased suicides and high rates of loneliness have many researchers scrambling to gather data about what might be contributing to this intensifying public mental health crisis.

Christian counselor and author Sissy Goff has written several books on the subject; her most recent, The Worry-Free Parent, confronts parental anxiety and its potential effects on children.

Haidt and others have pointed out that participation in religious communities seems to correlate with positive mental health outcomes for children. And with substantial research that links community music-making—particularly choral singing—to mental and physical health improvements, the local church is positioned to serve as a uniquely powerful space for children to express joy, find belonging and peace, and seek communion with God.

Keith Getty points out that songs of the faith, especially those we use in corporate worship, have to give voice to a range of experiences. Worshipers expect and need that variety as adults, and the church should offer the same to kids.

Children’s musician Yancy Wideman Richmond, who performs as “Yancy,” agrees.

“Just like you wouldn’t feed anyone you love a diet of only cotton candy and sweet treats, you can’t only lead kids in ‘Father Abraham’ or ‘Church Clap’ and expect that it’s the substance they are going to need when the going gets tough,” she recently wrote in an article titled “Helping Kids Exchange Anxiety for a Garment of Praise.”

Richmond is the author of Sweet Sound: The Power of Discipling Kids in Worship. She believes it’s important to acknowledge that kids go through “real life battles,” be it illness, a car accident, or other family trauma. And the financial, relational, and physical struggles of adults profoundly affect the children in their lives.

“Are you giving them prayers to sing as they war in the spirit over their self-esteem, friendships and family?” she asks.

Music therapists point out that music has observable positive effects for babies, young children, and adolescents. It can calm infants and help children identify and reflect on complex emotions. Children who learn to play instruments or to compose music seem to benefit from having an area of life in which they can develop creative control and mental focus. Musical ensembles provide community for older children and teenagers.

The church remains one of the few places where people habitually gather to engage in communal music-making, and children benefit from the musical and spiritual formation that happens in that setting.

With the end of the school year and the season of vacation Bible school around the corner, it’s a good time for leaders to consider their approach to kids’ worship music.

The impulse to offer children a simple resolution to a Bible story or problem often shows up in Christian music for children. Repetitive mantras like “My God is so big, so strong and so mighty” are words we want our children to learn, but they are capable of doing more than singing spiritual positive affirmations, says Lindsey Goetz, a master’s student in educational ministries and the resource director at the Center for Faith and Children at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

“Jesus is aware and present to children in a way that we can never be,” she said. “Children are capable of having real relationships and encounters with Jesus now.”

Goetz also warns against leaning too heavily on high-energy hype songs when looking for ways to welcome children into corporate worship. “Children can enjoy quiet. Children enjoy being taken seriously.”

The Gettys are in the process of compiling a hymnal in cooperation with Crossway (forthcoming in 2025); it will include a section of hymns written with children in mind.

Keith Getty says that the songs in the section are all intended to teach foundations of the faith, to be simple enough to sing at home, and to sound timeless enough to be usable and appealing in ten years.

“We want our kids to know great hymns that they can carry with them for their whole lives,” said Getty. “Singing is a wonderful opportunity to ground our joys, our memories, our faith.”

A father of four, Getty reflected on the special significance of the hymn “Be Thou My Vision” for his family and the script its verses provide for different phases of life—“be thou my wisdom,” “riches I heed not,” “High King of heaven.”

“To carry these words with you, what a gift,” said Getty.

Hymns and songs of praise can provide a vocabulary for kids in moments of crisis or struggle. Songs like Shane & Shane’s “Take Heart (John 16:33)” can teach kids to hold on to Scripture and the promises of God—“take heart … You have overcome the world”—when life feels overwhelming or scary.

By giving them music that takes their worries and hardships seriously, we point children toward a God who can handle their questions and doubts.

But taking a utilitarian view of the role of music for teaching and faith formation can also rob children of their spiritual autonomy, warns Goetz. “Are we looking for authentic engagement on the part of the child? Or are we looking for the child to produce something that makes us think we have accomplished what we set out to accomplish?”

When it comes to helping children who are struggling with anxiety, it may be that parents are projecting their own fears onto the music, books, and educational materials we offer rather than allowing young people to participate in music-making with curiosity and freedom.

“We don’t know what it’s like to grow up in a world where everyone has a cell phone in their hand all the time,” said Goetz, who sees that reality as a call to trust, not to seize more control of kids’ lives. And offering more agency and freedom in children’s participation in the life of the church is one significant way to lean into that trust.

“We need to get better at equipping parents. Not with more spiritual busywork, but with a peaceful assurance that Jesus is here, working now in us and in our children.”

Parents, perhaps even more than children, will benefit from the words of “Jesus Calms the Storm” as they work through their own fears about the world their children are facing as they grow. They can find comfort in knowing that they and their children look to the same source of peace in every storm.

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

News

Francis Collins’s New Project: Eliminate Hepatitis C

Emily Belz

The Christian doctor and researcher sees a “moral imperative” in destroying a curable fatal illness. Other countries are on track to erase it, but not the United States.

Dr. Francis Collins testifies in Congress.

Stefani Reynolds-Pool / Getty Images

Francis Collins, the former longtime head of the National Institutes of Health and founder of BioLogos, has seen deaths in his work as a physician and researcher. But some of those have been personal: He watched his brother-in-law die a slow and painful death from complications of hepatitis C, an often fatal disease that attacks the liver. Rick Boterf died two years before the cure for hepatitis C became available in 2014.

In the decade since the cure has become available, most Americans diagnosed with hepatitis C have not received the cure. Collins is now spearheading a push from the Biden administration to eliminate the disease by funding more treatment to populations that may not currently have any access. The measure is awaiting a budget score that will forecast its future in Congress.

“It’s difficult to appreciate how serious and dangerous this viral illness is, because most infected people will live without any symptoms for a decade or more,” Collins told CT. Those suffering from the disease tend to be drug users and those who are incarcerated. Infections have increased in the last decade with the explosion of the drug crisis.

“Reaching those with hepatitis C fits with our responsibility to help vulnerable and marginalized people that Jesus called ‘the least of these,’” Collins added. “Curing hepatitis C is almost a moral imperative—the opportunity in our hands to prevent 15,000 deaths every year.”

More than 2.4 million Americans have hepatitis C, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but there haven’t been the funds and systems to make the oral pill cure widely available. Only 34 percent of Americans diagnosed from 2013 to 2022 were cured.

Fifteen countries, including Egypt and Australia, are on track to eliminate hepatitis C by 2030 through screening and treatment programs. The United States is not one of those 15.

Collins, in his work as head of the Human Genome Project, was one of the scientists who discovered the gene for cystic fibrosis. That discovery led to a breakthrough treatment for a disease that was previously a death sentence. Now, the scientist and Christian wants to eliminate another deathly illness.

Hepatitis C infections spread through blood, usually by people injecting illicit drugs. As drug use has risen with the opioid crisis, so have infections. Roughly 70,000 Americans contract hepatitis C every year, especially in non-white communities. Scientists noted a surprising dip in infections in 2022, but that was among white Americans.

The disease can lead to cirrhosis as well as liver cancer and can require a liver transplant, which is expensive or impossible to obtain.

Louise R., whose last name is withheld to protect sensitive health information, was diagnosed while incarcerated in the 1990s. She said the war on drugs and the influx of women into incarceration had “consequences for Black and brown women especially.” She said she received poor medical treatment while incarcerated.

“I knew the seriousness of it, but I didn’t have a way out,” she said.

After her release, Louise was trying to hold down a job and raise young children.

“I wasn’t looking for anything to be in my way,” she said. “[For] women who have been incarcerated, that’s one of the things that hinders us from being fully in our lives when we come home—the challenges we have medically that were not addressed during our incarceration.”

When the hepatitis C cure finally became available, the drug was expensive, so she worried whether her insurance would cover it. But she received approval to do the treatment.

Without insurance or a trusted doctor who educated and advised her on the process, “I don’t know what I would have done,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it, when I was tested and didn’t have the disease anymore.”

Eliminating hepatitis C in the US heavily depends on treating those who are incarcerated. But studies have found that uneven health care in prisons, limited funding, and limited follow-up after prisoners’ release has made this a difficult goal to achieve.

Collins has some congressional Republicans and Democrats onboard with the elimination plan, but it’s still up in the air. The big question is how the Congressional Budget Office will score the cost of such a program. Collins says it can only save money on long-term health costs, since it prevents expenses like a liver transplant or hospital stays.

The White House budget requested $11 billion for the program over five years, a steep price tag. One study, supported in part by federal agencies, estimated that over the next ten years the initiative would save $18 billion in direct health care costs, with $13 billion of those savings accruing to the federal government.

The program would reduce the cost of the treatment drugs by paying drug companies a set amount like a subscription rather than per dose, a program that Louisiana piloted at the state level. That was a model that Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican and liver doctor, supported.

Right now, people who have support systems in place and jobs with health insurance tend to be the ones who can obtain treatment. But that’s not the story for many with the disease.

Jen S., whose last name is also withheld, found out she had hepatitis C in 2004. She was pregnant and in drug recovery at the time.

“It was a huge worry, having a small child and a blood-borne infection that you don’t know how to treat,” she said. “I didn’t have any counseling around it.”

Raising her son while she had the virus, she would be afraid of treating his wounds if he fell, on the chance that she might have a cut that would infect him. The virus is highly infectious with even invisible amounts of blood.

“That time with our children is really precious. I wish I had known more and been treated earlier,” she said.

Jen finally received the cure in 2019. Being cleared of the virus made her realize how much it was affecting her in ways she didn’t realize.

“I gained control of my health in other ways once I was treated,” she said. “A healthy choice makes it easier to make other healthy choices.”

But she noted that she had a lot of “assets” in her life to help support her on the treatment process: a job, a house, family, and a friend who did the treatment at the same time as her. Many who are in drug recovery don’t have that. “I’m really grateful I was able to get it,” she said.

Jen said that churches could help get more people into testing and treatment if they were already doing work in the community, like through mobile clinics or needle exchanges. Those kinds of outreaches would be key for populations with the virus that may not go to doctors regularly.

Reaching patients on the margins who have hepatitis C has been a problem with state-level programs. Some faith-based health ministries, like Los Angeles Christian Health Centers, advertise that they provide care for hepatitis C.

Collins also knows the project will be difficult.

“Once in a generation, we get a chance to eliminate a disease,” Collins said. “That time is now, but we’re not making it happen.”

- More from Emily Belz