Asian Americans: Silent No More

Asian American Christians are growing in influence and audience. Will they be embraced by their broader church family?

Courtesy of Hmong District

Peter Hong raises his voice to the congregation he pastors in Logan Square, a mixed-income neighborhood in Chicago. “Your entire debt is paid in full!” he shouts, as “Amen!” and “All right!” echo back from the pews. As he bounds across the stage, his red-checked shirt untucked over jeans, he exudes enough energy to fill the cavernous, high-ceilinged Seventh-day Adventist church that New Community Covenant rents on Sundays.

The pews are packed full, with a multiethnic, multigenerational gathering that includes more than Hong’s fellow Korean Americans. Hong is 44 but brims with youthfulness as he displays his own brand of impassioned preaching, a firebrand of grace. But then the tone of the service shifts as Hong jumps off the stage and confesses without pretense: He is bone-weary from more than 12 consecutive years of ministry. Congregants return the flow of grace, pouring down the aisles in droves to surround and pray for him.

One of the people who approaches Hong is Trinity Evangelical Divinity School professor Peter Cha, who has mentored countless Asian Americans as an educator, pastor, and former staff member with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Decades ago, Cha doubted that Asian Americans could have this kind of influence in the broader church. “In the 1990s, Asian American pastors were asking, ‘Can an Asian American ever serve as lead pastor of a multiracial church?’” says Cha. “Now as we see the example of pastors like Hong and many others, we can laugh at the absurdity of that question. But back then it was a genuine concern.”

It’s still possible to miss the ways Asian Americans are shaping American Christianity. With just a few exceptions, Asian Americans rarely headline major conferences, attract media attention, or top Christian publishing’s bestseller lists. But thanks to their bicultural heritage and the particular challenges it brings, Asian American Christians are finding they have unique voices and gifts that allow them to connect with both non–Asian American audiences and segments of the church that no one else can reach.

A Broader Call

From the tonal Chinese spoken all around you as you walk into the modern, yellow-hued building of Bay Area Chinese Bible Church (BACBC), you might assume that you’d crossed an ocean to get there.

In fact, BACBC, right down the street from Oakland International Airport, began as a ministry to English-speaking Chinese Americans in the 1950s. It then developed a ministry for Cantonese-speaking immigrants from Hong Kong, and added a service six years ago for migrants who speak Mandarin (as well as another campus). Every Sunday it attracts more than 1,000 attendees spanning multiple generations, languages, and cultures. Yet its senior pastor does not even speak Chinese.

Steve Quen is a fourth-generation, American-born Chinese whose father fought for the United States in the Korean War. Quen draws on both Western and Chinese culture to manage his culturally complex congregation, which he has attended for more than 40 years and led since 1997. “Here in the Bay Area is a huge unchurched Asian population. Who is reaching them? Not all Asian Americans are going to feel comfortable in an Anglo-evangelical church,” Quen says. “Our church can reach a Chinese American’s whole family, from his grandparents, to his parents, to himself and his kids.”

On the opposite coast, Jeanette Yep serves as global and regional outreach pastor at 66-year-old Grace Chapel in Lexington, Massachusetts. She is the first American-born Asian American pastor on staff at Grace, which has moved over the past decade from being majority-white to one-third multiethnic. Yep represents a growing number of Asian American pastors who are called to staff prominent, historically Anglo churches.

“For Grace Chapel as a whole, I present as an Asian American pastor who loves God and his world,” she says. “My ethnicity is part of who I am. I’m aware that I’m Asian, and I’m not ashamed of it. I hope the younger folks in the congregation begin to think that having folks on the pastoral staff who look like me and who love God and his world is normative and right.”

Just as churches like Grace seek to diversify their leadership and congregation, many churches that began with a clear Asian American focus now sense a broader call. Several years ago, Lighthouse Christian Church, a pan–Asian American congregation in Bellevue, Washington, began to focus intentionally on its neighborhood—fully realizing that doing so would change its ethnic composition.

Jackie Siochi, a 46-year-old white stay-at-home mother whose family happened to visit a Lighthouse fall festival, became a Christian at Lighthouse five years ago and is now a lay leader. “The first time I came here, I was sitting in a room full of Asian American strangers, but I felt so comfortable,” she says. “Everyone wanted to serve me, bring me a cup of coffee, and get to know me. I was so welcomed.”

Lighthouse associate pastor Nancy Sugikawa believes Asian cultural values such as hospitality and a strong family atmosphere are attractive no matter one’s background. “Our church no longer makes reference to focusing on any cultural group,” says Sugikawa. “But if we are going to . . . share the burdens of those from very different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, we are going to be stretched. And God is preparing us for this.”

Cross-Cultural Connection

David Choi, 39, is another leader well prepared to be “stretched.” Church of the Beloved, which Choi planted in 2012, has already expanded to two locations in Chicago and a third in Seattle. Visitors to the city center Chicago location might assume it is pan–Asian American, but half the attendees are internationals, representing at least 25 countries.

“I had to navigate two cultures growing up,” Choi says. “There is not a single Asian American who didn’t have to do that. So I can put myself in the shoes of people who are in different cultural contexts and demonstrate that I value their context and culture. Then they become so open to the gospel.”

I witness the fluidity of Choi’s cultural competency one summer evening on the campus of Wheaton College. As I sit in Edman Chapel, I’m surrounded by more than 1,500 amped-up Hmong American youth. The Hmong are an ethnic minority group in Southeast Asia and China who immigrated to the States in the 1970s and ’80s to escape political persecution. Many of their now-teenaged children are here in force at the biennial HLUB (“love” in Hmong) Conference, sponsored by the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Choi is warming up the students, shouting newly learned phrases such as Koj zoo nkauj! (“You are beautiful!”) alternating with Korean words. “Kimchi!” he yells, and the crowd roars in laughter. “How do you know Korean?” Choi asks, amused. “Korean dramas?” He gets an even bigger cheer.

Cross-cultural connection established, Choi exegetes the parable of the Prodigal Son, tells stories about growing up Korean American, then gives a simple altar call. The response is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Hundreds and hundreds stand, creating a traffic jam of teenagers waiting to meet with counselors. Of course, it’s the work of the Holy Spirit. But I can’t help thinking that Choi’s heritage is one gift the Spirit is using to move so powerfully this particular night, among youth you’d rarely find in an Anglo-dominated evangelical setting.

The Perpetual Foreigner Syndrome

Asian Americans’ multicultural competence is rooted in the pain of marginalization. The “model minority myth” perpetuates the idea that Asian Americans are a well-educated, high-achieving, perfectly assimilated monolith. In reality, you’d be hard-pressed to find an Asian American who hasn’t felt at some point like an interloper in his or her own country.

Marie Yuen, an American-born Chinese writer, recalls the moment in kindergarten when a blonde-haired, blue-eyed classmate wanted to tell her a secret. “She said to me, ‘The secret is, you look funny! With your black hair and your pointy eyes! I bet your mommy and daddy talk funny, too. I bet it sounds like ching chong chong Chinaman chink!’

“I used to love my long, black hair, but that night, my mom cut my hair short so I could never be teased about it again,” Yuen says. For most of her adult life, she has grown her hair to waist-length or longer, a symbolic defiance of the hurt she weathered as a child.

Such experiences are as frequent in church contexts as in schools. Drew Yamamoto, a Reformed Church in America pastor, remembers preaching in the Midwest to compliments, but not the kind he hoped for. “One white man said to me, ‘You speak English really well.’ I answered back, ‘You do too.’ I’m a third-generation Japanese American. People would ask me where I was from, and I would tell them San Francisco. They would ask what nationality I was, and I would reply, ‘American.’ Which would frustrate them!”

In his book Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, law professor Frank H. Wu describes the “perpetual foreigner” syndrome, confirmed every time Asian Americans are asked the seemingly innocent question, “Where are you really from?” Wu writes, “More than anything else that unites us, everyone with an Asian face who lives in America is afflicted by the perpetual foreigner syndrome.” White Americans—even those with a more recent immigration history than Asian Americans whose families have been here for generations—are generally not subject to the same line of questioning.

North Park Seminary professor Soong-Chan Rah remembers speaking with a group of white seminary professors visiting the host church where his congregation met on Sundays. When Rah invited the professors to stay for worship, one of them quickly replied, “Oh, I can’t stay. I only speak English.”

“Why did he assume the service was going to be in Korean after a half-hour conversation with me in English?

“He assumed . . . this is where I belonged, as an immigrant pastor leading an immigrant congregation speaking a foreign language,” says Rah. “It’s a common experience of marginalization that Asian Americans have in the church, to be viewed as foreigners and outsiders.”

Speaking As One Voice

Most Asian Americans have learned to gracefully tolerate these misconceptions. But such ignorance has taken on a more institutionalized form all too frequently in recent years, expressed in Christian books, conference skits, curricula, and offhand comments in social media that have perpetuated stereotypes, sometimes quite crude, of Asian Americans.

Responding to these repeated offenses, a group of Asian American Christian leaders released “An Open Letter to the Evangelical Church” in October 2013. (Full disclosure: I was one of the original organizers of the effort.) Initially signed by 83 leaders from East Asian, Southeast Asian, and South Asian backgrounds, the letter represented a wide range of ages, professions, and theological persuasions. More than 1,000 people, including many non–Asian Americans, have added their signatures, reflecting a collective frustration at Asian Americans being treated as outsiders and foreigners in the church.

“The Open Letter was so crucial,” says Jerry Park, associate professor of sociology at Baylor University. “Asian American evangelicalism had been playing along with white evangelicalism for several decades. Why don’t we have more of a presence at the table in white evangelicalism? As our nation continues to diversify, white evangelicalism is not becoming diverse. If you look at all the institutional influences in evangelical Christianity—the media, publishers, political presence—it’s almost entirely white.”

Kathy Khang, another initial organizer of the Open Letter, sees it as a key moment of public identification. “To have people sign, to put down their names, to identify who they are and what they do—it was a moment in our Asian American evangelical history to say, ‘We are a very diverse community, but together we care deeply about the marginalization that is going on.’ It was unbelievable to finally speak as one voice into the church that we love.”

The Open Letter prompted several evangelical institutions to respond. The Exponential church-planting conference and LifeWay Christian Resources (the publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention) issued public apologies for their roles in releasing racially insensitive materials. (LifeWay’s apology came 10 years after publishing a VBS curriculum called “Rickshaw Rally.” It included a song with the line, “Wax on, wax off, get your rickshaw ready!”—referring to the movie The Karate Kid and using the rickshaw as a focal point, even though it had become a symbol of oppressive class systems throughout Asia.)

But the letter was not without critics, including Asian Americans. Some disapproved of its public nature—one Asian American wrote, “I am not signing this letter. . . . A mass letter like this does not edify the entire body of Christ.” Others objected to the focus on racial identity in spite of Paul’s instruction in Galatians that “there is no Jew nor Greek . . . for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Ken Fong, who with Daniel D. Lee directs Fuller Theological Seminary’s new Asian American Initiative, observes that even Asian American leaders vary greatly in how they conceive of their ethnic and racial identity. “Western evangelicalism has contributed to [Asian Americans’] lack of self-awareness,” Fong says. “People have been raised to think, I have a born-again identity, so I don’t need to understand issues of self-identity. If the only Asian Americans in an organization are the ones who feel like everything is okay, then they are giving an organization a false sense of representation.”

Perhaps the biggest unanswered question after the Open Letter is whether evangelicalism will move beyond apologies for specific slights to fully understanding the issues that prompted it. “I fear evangelicalism won’t take us seriously,” says Jonathan Tran, associate professor of religion at Baylor University. “It’s unclear to me whether most white Americans, and in particular white American Christians, care about the issue of race.”

Living with Painful Pasts

One of the challenges with a phrase like “Asian American” is that it represents an immense diversity of cultures and people groups, including those from East Asian, Southeast Asian, and South Asian backgrounds.

Billy Vo, who directs the Asian American Ministry program at Seattle Pacific University, is a second-generation Vietnamese American. “Like many Southeast Asians who grew up fatherless, I wanted to assimilate into the East Asian context because that is where I saw my first examples of healthy Asian American homes and men,” he says. “But now I’ve become self-aware of my own racial identity formation, what is part of my own story. Asian American Christianity can be articulated as an East Asian reality, rather than the diverse, multicultural reality that it really is.”

For numerous Asian Americans, pain comes from forms of trauma, such as being rejected by parents or ripped from one’s homeland as a child. Ken Kong directs the Southeast Asian Catalyst and works on staff with the Navigators. This summer he visited Cambodia, from which he fled at age 4 to find safety at a Thai refugee camp. But as he walked on the same road he traveled with his parents decades ago, his heart started racing. He remembered what his family witnessed: decomposing bodies, ragged and bloodied clothes, remains of people who had encountered landmines placed by the Khmer Rouge.

With their country engulfed in a brutal civil war, the Kongs had no choice but to leave it behind, the journey itself life-threatening. Kong says, “The American church needs to know that our past pains still haunt us to this day. My father and mother, both strong believers, still live in pain. They lost three kids on that journey.”

As Asian American Christians grow in understanding and embrace painful experiences, they can bring these perspectives to help all Christians grasp what it means to live as aliens in a reality that is not their true home.

Reaching the Fringes and the Center

At the same time, as Asian American Christians and the broader church partner together, they also bear witness to the power of Christ’s love to unite people across ethnic and racial lines.

Seeing many of his peers leave their parents’ Indian churches, Ajay Thomas planted Seven Mile Road Church in Philadelphia five years ago. Second-generation Indian Americans make up most of Thomas’s congregation—and not all of their parents approve. “Some in my parents’ generation love and pray for us, and some think we’re a cult,” Thomas says. “My non-Indian church-planting friends can’t relate when I tell them I have 35-year-old professionals with kids who can’t come to Seven Mile Road because of parental pressures.”

Early in his ministry, Thomas made an unusual connection with the small, aging St. Mark’s German Evangelical Reformed Church. “For a largely German church to meet a second-generation Indian guy, to let me preach in their pulpit, then to join with us—it was amazing,” Thomas says. Before long, St. Mark’s gave their six-acre, three-building, $2 million property to Seven Mile Road, and a number of St. Mark’s members later joined.

St. Mark’s didn’t just choose to give Thomas a chance to exercise his voice in their cultural context, but also subsumed its culture into that of Seven Mile Road. Will that happen in more Christian institutions in the coming generations? Fuller’s Fong says, “I think that Asian Americans want to say to the larger church body, ‘We do exist, and we have important things going on we would like to share with the wider body, but that doesn’t mean we want to replace you at the center. What we do may be viewed as on the fringes of evangelicalism. But as the center is faltering and showing weakness, there is much to be learned on the fringes. Will you see a need for what we bring?’”

Even as Asian Americans lead more churches and Christian institutions, North Park Seminary’s Rah believes that “the real question is, How fundamentally is the culture of your organization changing? How fundamentally are the narratives in the church changing to include us?”

I think back to my time at Hong’s church in Chicago—his exuberant preaching, the vulnerability he displayed in sharing his struggles, and the protective way his church surrounded him in prayer. I remember how distinct the service felt, like nothing I had experienced at other Asian, Asian American, or majority-white evangelical churches.

“I am not trying to imitate anyone. I am not trying to mimic anyone. I’m doing what’s intuitive to me,” says Hong. “Sometimes Asian Americans can be assimilationists, and they take what they are taught in seminary hook, line, and sinker. But you have to find your own voice by building upon both your ethnic and cultural heritages.”

Hong and other Asian American leaders are reaching both the masses and margins of evangelicalism, born out of their bicultural heritages that seek to merge the best of both their Asian and American influences. Will evangelicalism fully welcome and include these voices, or turn them away for being too different, too foreign? It is probably still too soon to tell.

Helen Lee is associate editor for IVP Books/IVP Praxis at InterVarsity Press and a former CT editor. She is the author of The Missional Mom (Moody) and coeditor of Growing Healthy Asian American Churches (IVP).

This article appeared in the October, 2014 issue of Christianity Today as "Silent No More".

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Pastors

Redefining the Kingdom?

Scot McKnight, interviewed by Paul Pastor

Scot McKnight says we’re using “Kingdom” wrong. Here’s why that matters.

Isaac Levitan, "Above the Eternal Tranquility" (detail), 1894.

It's not often that a book on my desk for review actually changes my mind about something. But Scot McKnight's Kingdom Conspiracy (releasing October 21 from Brazos, and available for pre-order online) persuaded me that today's evangelicals misuse the biblical term "kingdom" in ways that, though well-intentioned, carry negative implications for the work of the Church. I followed up with McKnight, professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary in Lombard, Illinois, to draw out more for PARSE's readers. – Paul

You argue that “kingdom” is the term most misused by Christians today. In short, how do we misuse it?

Kingdom is misused because we all assume we know what it means. Like the word “gospel,” which I examined in King Jesus Gospel, which constantly is used for “how to get saved” or the “message that can be shaped into the plan of salvation.” This is not how “gospel” was used in the New Testament. So with the word “kingdom,” which has become nearly synonymous with two different standard uses.

For some "kingdom" means acting in the public sector for the common good in order to create a world with better conditions, and for others it has come to mean little more than salvation, or what I often call “redemptive moments.” If we care to shape our theology and our use of terms like “kingdom” on the basis of what the Bible says, then those two definitions are gross reductions of what the Bible says.

Yes, of course, kingdom includes ethics (though they are not to be secularized as progressives sometimes do) and it brings redemption (as many Christians are prone to say), but those are only two aspects of a much fuller story about kingdom in the Bible. Until we get each of the elements into play we are not looking at what the Bible is saying.

So, is “kingdom” just “Church”?

Yes and no. By adding “just” the balance is tipped toward the negative. One overhears someone groaning or rolling their eyes to say, “You can’t really mean you want to reduce kingdom to church.” Again, we get those pejorative terms at work. No, the kingdom cannot be reduced to what many think of the church, but I would say we need to expand church to kingdom proportions.

But here’s the issue: there are five elements of a kingdom in the Bible.

First, you have to have a king. That is God in Christ.

Second, the king has to rule to be a true king. A king without a rule is an empty mask.

Third, for a king to rule the king has to have something to rule. In fact, someone, and even more, some people. So, for there to be a kingdom you have to have a king who rules a people. At this point we must ask a simple question: Who is the people over whom God rules? The answer to that question in the Bible, is Israel and the church. In Christian terms we put it like this: for the kingdom to exist in the Bible we need God to rule in Christ over a people called the church. Kingdom people are church people, church people are kingdom people.

Fourth, a king rules a people by way of his will expressed in law. That is, the Torah for Israel and for the church the teachings of Jesus and life in the Spirit.

Finally, and this is an element that needs some more work but it is not a focus in my book, for there to be a kingdom there must be a king ruling over a people who dwell in a space, or a land. I believe the land promises expand in the New Testament but these five elements are now clear.

So, yes, the church now is the kingdom now.

One more important point: let’s learn to compare like to like. It does no good to compare the future kingdom—utopia, an ideal future—to the present reality of the church and then to say the church is not the kingdom. The kingdom is both a now and not yet reality and the church too is a now and not yet reality. We need to compare the present kingdom with the present church and the future kingdom with the future church. When we do that the circles are all but the same. Open your Bible and look up the word “kingdom” in the OT and ask yourself to whom/what it refers. Nearly every time it refers to Israel or a nation. We conclude that “kingdom is a people.”

Bring that home—why does our terminology of kingdom matter for theology and practical ministry?

We live in a day when an increasing number of Christians have fallen for the idea that God’s real and best and most important work is in the public sector, in making the world a better place, in the halls of power like Washington DC, in working for the homeless and hungering.

These are all “good works” (as I argue in the book) but this colossal shift among evangelicals has resulted in two major changes: (1) a decreasing interest in pastoral and church ministry, and (2) a blanketing of everything outside the church with the word “kingdom” in order to sanctify and explain to ourselves that what we are doing is meaningful. The major reason for this book is to contend that God’s mission in this world is the church. I develop in the book an ecclesio-centric vision of kingdom and God’s work in this world.

I don’t ever suggest we ought not to be involved in good works in the world, but good works in the world are not what the Bible means by kingdom work.

It sure seems like a lot of the confusion here is a failure to do large-level biblical theology. Should pastors revisit their interpretive strategies?

Each leader in the church, especially those charged with teaching and preaching, are required to soak themselves in the grand story of the Bible in order to find our message and our mission in God’s revelation. I am calling us to re-examine the gauzy and flabby uses of kingdom at work in the church today. The most common use I am hearing today is that kingdom refers to good people doing good things in the public sector for the common good. Thus, kingdom work is public sector actions while church work is private religion. This is a colossal error and contrary to the Bible’s five themes about kingdom. We need to regain that biblical sense of kingdom.

Your nuanced view of kingdom has implications for discipleship. Can you unpack those a bit?

A preaching teacher who spends time with hundreds of young preachers in the USA told me that the vast majority (he said 90%) are preaching about social justice. I am urging us to learn to preach about Jesus and the gospel for the edification of the church. If this is the case, then our focus is to be about building kingdom citizens, people who learn to live under king Jesus by knowing and doing his will, people who learn to dwell with one another as a fellowship, and people who witness to the glory of God through a way of life together that counters the narratives of this world’s system of injustice, evil, and distortions. Discipleship then is more than just becoming a personal follower of Jesus; discipleship is about learning to live with disciples in such a way that we as a fellowship offer a brand new reality to the world’s systems.

Learning to see kingdom and church together this way leads us away from discipleship as simple individualism to discipleship as church formation. We learn to see spiritual disciplines as more than our personal growth and just as much, if not more, as local church growth and formation. We learn to see that our gifts are for the church, not ourselves; that the fruit of the Spirit is entirely shaped for group relations and not just personal virtues. We need then a more ecclesio-centric theory of discipleship.

Simply, how would a Christian leader lead differently after internalizing the biblical vision of “kingdom” rather than the popular one?

The leader would ask this question first: How is our church reflecting the kingdom of God to the world in our context? The leader’s first question would not be: How am I reflecting the kingdom of God to the world in my personal life?

This ecclesio-centric theory of kingdom then calls us to group formation and to see that our church is called to embody the kingdom in the here and now in our local context as a witness to God’s redemption now unleashed.

Paul J. Pastor is associate editor of Leadership Journal and PARSE.

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Pastors

When the Cowboy Walked Away

Name Withheld

What I learned when the man I discipled rejected me.

“I am through with your church, and I am through with you.”

The words pierced me like a knife. After more than a decade, it came to this.

Eleven years earlier Billy (not his real name) began attending a men’s small group I started. A man’s man, he enjoyed riding horses and driving four-wheelers. He arrived on his blue Harley Davidson early each Thursday morning for breakfast, Bible study, and fellowship. Though not a believer initially, Billy soon saw his need for Jesus Christ. He received the Lord and was baptized.

A promising start

Billy became more and more hungry for spiritual things, and I enjoyed helping him grow. We met for lunch regularly. For two to three years I invested in him heavily. Because he drove trucks for a living, during his weeks on the road we talked on the phone frequently. Over many calls and Mexican lunches, we discussed Bible reading, obedience, and what it means to be a godly man. He witnessed to people he met in truck stops across the Southeast. As he grew, he decided to get his financial house in order. He sold the blue Harley and began regularly giving money to the church.

Billy’s family of origin was dysfunctional and he had a strained relationship with his parents. Though they lived in the same town, they went for months without communicating. Billy suffered from the rejection—and a habitual tendency to perceive rejection even when there was none. As he grew in the Lord, we worked through how to cope with negative, irrational patterns of thought. We discussed how to walk in the sound mind of Christ. As he continued maturing he seemed to rise above this rejection syndrome.

One year, Billy decided to participate in our church’s mission trip to Ghana, Africa. Our small group rejoiced to see Billy prepare, and we prayed for him daily. But the day after he returned, I knew something was wrong. He was not himself. Later, when I confronted him at his house, he admitted to immoral sexual activity with another member of the mission trip.

I met the next night with a few select leaders of our church. We prayed about how to help Billy and his family through this nightmare. We kept the news from spreading and worked hard to protect Billy and his wife as well as the other involved family. During the next year, my wife and I walked through a long, painful process with Billy and his wife of learning to forgive, restore, and trust again. They became a picture of God’s grace, and we thanked God for saving their marriage.

Our families grew close the next few years. Our wives hung out. Our children played together. We embarked on mini-vacations and regularly talked about the next great place we wanted to go. Pastors’ wives frequently have difficulty finding authentic friends, but Billy’s wife became one to mine.

Eventually my wife and I sensed God’s leadership to leave our ministry position. As we sought guidance, we made plans to start a new church in our town. Billy and his wife decided to help. Initially, four families agreed to step out in faith and see what God would do. In January of 2011, Billy, two other men, and I met regularly for nightly meetings to discuss and pray.

Signs of trouble

During the first year, Billy’s job ended, and he took a new position with a schedule that kept him on the road many nights. Billy, a people-person, became lonely and unhappy away from home, church, and friends. It became harder to include Billy in church decisions, meetings, and conversations. We involved more people on the leadership team, and Billy felt isolated and ignored.

In November of that year, Billy’s doctor ordered him to take medical leave for serious depression. He came home for several weeks and began medication. But after returning to work, Billy continued in a slow downward spiral. The maturity of former years began to slowly be replaced by moodiness and anger. The sound mind of Christ faded, replaced by irrationality. The acceptance he knew in the fellowship of the Lord was replaced by the feelings of rejection from his youth.

Over the next year, Billy became highly critical of the church and its key leaders. When he planned a retreat for the men of the church, it offended him terribly that I chose to come home one night early so that I could preach at church. He told me, “You can be gone on a Sunday to take the youth on a trip, but you can’t miss a Sunday for my trip?”

He didn’t like a decision the church leaders made to rent a building: “None of you listened to what I said.” In reality, we listened—but simply disagreed with him. He tried planning a men’s cookout in the middle of a building renovation project. He took it as personal rejection when I and the project coordinator asked him to postpone the event until we could complete the project—in a small church you need all the manpower you can muster. But he didn’t see it that way. “You shot down my idea,” he said.

Billy complained that the men in the church did not call or text him enough. The list went on and on. At almost every monthly leadership meeting, someone asked about Billy. We prayed for Billy. The deacons made a point to talk to Billy every time he came and to tell him that they were glad to see him.

I knew Billy was losing touch with reality when he told me, “The last time I came to church, when I opened the door, everyone turned around, saw me, and looked unhappy to see me. No one wanted to talk to me, and so I went and sat down by myself.” Those were the irrational words of a man spiraling in clinical depression. Fiction was becoming fact.

We did not know then that Billy had also shut God out of his life. And he began an adulterous affair.

For six months, he and another local woman engaged in a sexual relationship. He shut out me and most of our church’s men. He would not return our phone calls and changed his number without telling us. When he dropped his son off at my house for a birthday party, he stayed in his truck and refused to talk to me.

For months, the deacons asked each other, “What is wrong? What have we done?”

Billy finally repented of his adultery, confessed to his wife, and ended the affair. However, he stayed caught in a cycle of rejection and irrationality.

Rumors circulated around our small town. Questions came at school functions, on the ball field, and in the grocery story. “Has Billy had an affair?”

Finally, months after admitting to his wife, Billy came to see me. He told me of his sin, but at the same time he listed numerous ways he felt the church failed him. He inferred that my poor pastoral behavior aided in his downward spiral.

His criticisms seemed endless. I didn’t text him enough. I didn’t call him enough. I should have visited him at his house. My wife should have stopped by their house. My family did not sign up to clean the church enough. My wife should sing more at church.

I later realized that he came partly to notify me that they would no longer come to our church. “I’ve got to find somewhere that I can worship,” he said. “I have had a very hard heart toward you. A very hard heart.”

We were a long way from the jolly friends who threw a Frisbee on the beach or rode a train together at Dollywood.

Upon leaving, he instructed me, “Don’t tell anyone about this.” I knew intuitively that at least for the present, the relationship was over. I began a process of grieving. But I also turned a corner that afternoon. I accepted the fact that I could not please him. For more than a year I had endured his complaints, hoping he would bounce back and like me again.

That afternoon I let myself off the hook. I accepted that I would not have his favor.

Charles Swindoll writes, “God says there is a ‘time to shun embracing’ (Ecclesiastes 3:5) just as there are times to embrace. ‘To give up as lost’ (3:6) may, on some occasions, be the wisest response, though extremely painful.”

The following days, I processed many things: his clinical depression, irrational thinking, critical spirit, suicidal tendencies, isolated life, and habitual sexual immorality. Instead of allowing the men in our church to carry his burdens, he distanced himself.

The next week, one of our deacons asked me face-to-face, “Has Billy had an affair?” I replied, “I can’t answer that question.” He knew the answer immediately by the look on my face.

The next several days I made a decision I still do not regret.

The Christian counselor Jay Adams writes that to give someone absolute confidentiality is an unbiblical stance: “No such vow to silence should ever be made.” Instead, we should say, “I am glad to keep confidence in the way that the Bible instructs me. That means, of course, that I shall never involve others unless God requires me to do so.”

Sometimes love demands that we involve other people in the body of Christ in order to help a wayward brother or sister. We want others to love them, pray for them, correct and train them, with the goal of restoration. We want to see them walking uprightly in God’s grace once again.

As spiritual leaders, our deacons shared a responsibility for Billy’s life. He needed the godly men of our church. Some of these men loved and prayed for him for years, going back to that Thursday morning small group. We could not forsake him even if he did not want our help.

A few days later I shared Billy’s news with the deacons. We grieved. We prayed. And we determined to go after him. I asked them to intentionally pursue Billy, assure him of our love, and tell him that we were not dropping him. I wrote Billy and his wife about my decision to involve the deacons, which infuriated the couple. One deacon later told me of his utter surprise that Billy saw me as an enemy and could see no goodwill from me.

I could not help but compare Billy’s attitude from the two times of sexual immorality. Both times I involved appropriate, godly church leaders. The first time Billy showed brokenness, humility, and submission. Antagonism and defensiveness marked him now.

I sent them a used copy of Dutch Sheets’ book Tell Your Heart to Beat Again. In a few weeks, Billy showed up at my back door early one morning and asked me to come outside. He returned the book, telling me that it was impossible to read because it had someone else’s markings inside. He shouted that the book was “ridiculous.”

He exclaimed, “You broke my confidence. You had no right. I am through with your church, and I am through with you!” I said, “God bless you. I love you.” And the cowboy stormed off, got into his truck, and sped away.

Letting go

The next several months my wife and I grieved the end of the relationship. Their family completely cut us off. My wife made several attempts at contacting his wife to no avail. One day my wife shared, “I have never had a friend that treated me like I was dead.”

It angered me to see my wife hurt. Billy took a job with a bad schedule, experienced clinical depression, thought irrationally, and wallowed in feelings of rejection. He forsook the Lord and committed immorality. So why were we the bad guys?

During that time, I read Henry Cloud’s book 9 Things You Simply Must Do to Succeed in Love and Life. In his chapter called Upset the Right People, he shares how making the right decisions sometimes involves upsetting irrational people with unrealistic expectations. Cloud explains the difference between hurting and harming. Harming involves wrong, destructive behavior. Hurting, however, is sometimes required to try and help someone grow. The Proverb says, “Wounds from a friend can be trusted.”

Sometimes “we make a decision to do something that pains them if it is done for a purpose, for one’s own well-being,” Cloud writes. “That is not inflicting harm at all, even if the person on the receiving end acts as if it is.”

The previous two years I battled Billy’s unrealistic expectations. I didn’t text him enough. If I texted, I should have called. If I called, I should have gone to his house.

I finally accepted Billy’s expectations of me and the church as unrealistic. He wanted us to meet unmet needs deep within him that only Christ and a better work schedule can satisfy.

I finally accepted that it was okay if I did not please him.

“You cannot speak the truth, live out good values, and choose your own direction without disappointing some people,” Cloud writes. “What you should do, and what someone’s response is going to be, are two very different issues.”

Jesus Christ and the apostle Paul both experienced rejection. They experienced the loss of followers and companions. On one occasion the Bible says that “many of [Jesus’] disciples withdrew and were not walking with him anymore” (John 6:66). Paul’s epistles include lists of men who deserted him. When forsaken, Paul said, “But the Lord stood with me and strengthened me” (2 Tim. 4:17).

The man I helped disciple rejected me. The man I helped many times did not want my help. And he did not want me. The cowboy walked away. Through it, I learned that sometimes you have to let them walk away. Jesus did not go after everyone, and neither can we.

The cowboy walked away. I am thankful that Jesus did not.

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News

Increasingly, Religious ‘Nones’ Support Pastors Preaching Politics on Pulpit Freedom Sunday

Ruth Moon

On eve of seventh Sunday protest, here’s what surveys suggest Americans think.

Alliance Defending Freedom

As almost 1,500 pastors attempt to provoke the IRS this Sunday by preaching political messages from their pulpits, a recent survey finds that Americans increasingly agree they should have such a right—including the religiously unaffiliated.

This weekend will be the seventh Pulpit Freedom Sunday, coordinated by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) to encourage pastors to break an existing law that prohibits registered nonprofit organizations from electioneering.

The Pew Research Center recently reported that nearly half of Americans (49 percent) now believe that churches (and other houses of worship) should express their views on social and political issues—including two-thirds of white evangelicals, more than half of black Protestants (who mostly identify as evangelicals), and one-third of so-called religious "nones." Support has risen most among mainline Protestants, from 35 percent in August 2010 to 49 percent in September 2014.

While most Americans still believe churches should not be allowed to outright endorse candidates, Pew reports "significant movement in the direction of more support" of this right. One-third of Americans now agree that churches should be allowed to favor candidates, and support among nones increased approximately 50 percent. In 2010, 26 percent of the religiously affiliated and 15 percent of the nones said they would favor churches publicly backing candidates; in 2014, the percentages increased to 35 and 23 percent, respectively. Among white evangelicals, 42% now favor pastors having this right, as do 39% of black Protestants.

CT has noted how ADF hopes to provoke the IRS into (ironically) punishing pastors in order to lead the federal government to review and overturn the law in question: the Johnson Amendment. The initiative even gained an unexpected ally last year in Sen. Charles Grassley and the Commission on Accountability and Policy for Religious Organizations (CAPRO).

The ADF has a strange bedfellow of sorts in its hope for a confrontation: An atheist legal group, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, also wants the IRS to investigate such activity (but hopes for an opposite outcome than ADF). It dropped a related lawsuit this summer after the IRS agreed to investigate and enforce electioneering prohibitions.

While ADF lists thousands of churches that have participated in Pulpit Freedom Sunday over the years, the IRS has only flagged a much smaller number of churches as problematic.

In a June letter, the tax agency told the U.S. Department of Justice that 99 churches "alleged to have violated the prohibition" merit “a high priority examination.” ADF lists 1,225 churches in 2013, but the IRS only cites one egregious violation that year. ADF lists 1,620 churches in 2012; the IRS cites only 65 churches. ADF lists 539 churches in 2011; the IRS cites only 18 churches.

CT's sister blog, Church Law and Tax, notes that the IRS had put church reviews on hold since 2009 when a Minnesota church challenged the audit process.

LifeWay Research, which offers five things to know about "the IRS and the pulpit," has found in surveys that 9 in 10 Protestant pastors believe pastors should not preach politics from the pulpit, but also 9 in 10 believe that the government shouldn't prohibit the practice.

Here is CT's previous reporting on Pulpit Freedom Sunday.

- More from Ruth Moon

Culture

Review

Fishing Without Nets

Larisa Kline

Seeing the Somali pirates from the other side.

'Fishing Without Nets'

Drafthouse Films

What have I done with my blessings?

No matter who’s asking this question, it should make you stop and think. But especially when it comes out of the mouth of a Somali pirate.

Okay, so one of the actual Somali pirates you heard about on the news several years ago or saw in Captain Philips probably didn’t actually say this—or not that you know of. In his first feature length film Fishing Without Nets, director Cutter Hodierne asks his audience to forget the narrative you think you know and hear the Somali side of the story.

Drafthouse Films

Steve Cokonis in ‘Fishing Without Nets’

Back in 2012, Hodierne directed a short film of the same name that followed the life of Abdi as he left his unsuccessful life as a fisherman in order to provide for his family. The film did so well at Sundance (it won the Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking) that Hodierne decided to go back to Africa in order to finish the story he began telling.

“wanted to do it from the perspective I found most interesting and try to do justice to the truth we wanted to tell . . . I hope the authenticity comes across,” Hodierne explained at the Q&A session following the New York screening of the film.

In order authentically re-tell the story of the 2009 cargo ship hijacking, Hodierne and his team flew to Mombasa, Kenya and searched for people who were actually affected or involved in the pirating. Only two people in the film were professional actors; the rest came to auditions at nightclubs throughout the area. They were surprised that someone cared about their story and wanted to be part of telling it. Hodierne even went so far as to include the perspectives of the hostages, because he wanted “to do this thing right.”

And Fishing Without Nets does just that.

Hodierne’s film captures a well-rounded truth about something that is difficult to see clearly from all sides. Hodierne is able to give us a look into the lives of people that we usually only see as caricatures in news reports and movie trailers.

Drafthouse Films

Abdi Siad in ‘Fishing Without Nets’

Fishing Without Nets reminds its audience that every single person involved in the 2009 cargo ship piracy was a human. And because of that fact, their story matters. Their stories deserve to be heard.

Hodierne takes his audience a step deeper than they might want to go. We watch a young Somali man fall in love; we see him father his child, and laugh with his family. We see so-called pirates joking with their friends and trying to figure out how to make ends meet, because “a man is not a man unless he can feed his family.” We hear their fears and see their pain.

While watching the film, I kept connecting the dots between this movie and Erich Maria Remarque’s World War I novel All Quiet on the Western Front. As a young American high school student, I didn’t understand why it was important for me to read a WWI novel from the perspective of a German soldier, but to this day the image of Paul watching the first man he killed die in pain for hours is engraved on my mind. Once Paul looked the “enemy” in the eye and was reminded that he too, was a human, that he too, has a family at home who loves him, he didn’t understand why that man should die. He too is his comrade.

In the same way, Hodierne’s lead character Abdi forges a friendship with one of the hostages and is reminded that he, too, is his comrade. Abdi washes the hostages hands before they eat, and the hostage in turn washes his. Although he can barely speak English, Abdi tries to explain to his friend, “You . . . me . . . jail.” Abdi too is imprisoned. He wants to do whatever it takes to feed his family, but he knows what he is doing is wrong.

Not only is the film a heartbreaking story, but it’s beautifully captured. Hodierne takes advantage of the natural aesthetics of the ocean and every move of the camera is smooth and easy.

Drafthouse Films

Abdikani Muktar in ‘Fishing Without Nets’

Fishing Without Nets isn’t a documentary, but it feels like one. “There’s something you can’t take off their faces. You can see their experience on their faces. You can’t wipe it off.” Hodierne is right. Although most of his actors have never acted before, they have lived. Not only that, but they lived through this specific tragedy. It’s something you have to see to understand.

I should warn you: this is a film that cannot be unseen. And if it hits you the way it hit me, leaves you unsettled and uncomfortable with the way we hardly ever think to hear the story on the other side. It leaves you wondering. What have I done with my blessings? Have I earned my fate with my own hands?

Caveat Spectator

Fishing Without Nets is rated R, which I think is to be expected from a movie about this sort of thing. For the faint of heart, there is an animal killed (for food), but it’s still a pretty intense moment. Foul language is sprinkled throughout—everything from the Lord’s name being taken in vain to more than a few variations of the f-word. There are a few sexual jokes and a pornographic magazine, but they are mostly blurred out. Throughout the film we see characters doing drugs or talking about them. One character threatens to take advantage of another. A few of the Somali pirates make racist remarks about the hostages. We only see one person quickly shot on screen and hear another.

Larisa Kline is an intern with Christianity Today Movies and a student at The King’s College in New York City.

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Culture

The Critics Roundup: “How to Get Away With Murder” and “The Equalizer”

Larisa Kline

Viola Davis and Denzel Washington get away with a whole lot.

Viola Davis in 'How To Get Away With Murder'

ABC

Fans of Scandal have been anxiously awaiting How to Get Away With Murder, a legal drama produced by Shonda Rhimes. With a title like that, it’s hard not to assume lead actress Viola Davis’s role as Annalise Keating—the lawyer by day, professor by night—will be as an antihero. Well, Keating is scarily good at what she does; according to PluggedIn’s Paul Asay, she “could get Dexter off on a technicality and posthumously clear Breaking Bad's Walter White by framing his wife.” Asay believes this is where the show’s problems begin: “To call Davis's Keating an antihero does a disservice to the tag. Keating and her cohorts don't do bad things for good reasons as much as they do bad things to just win, baby—at any cost.” Not only does Keating’s character come into question, but the rest of the show’s content as well. “Guilty pleasures don't get much guiltier,” admits Asay. And although viewers probably won’t actually learn How to Get Away with Murder, “there's no question this show gets away with nearly everything else.” While Paul Asay worries that viewers won’t be able to get past the salacious substance of ABC’s newest show, Variety’s Brian Lowry isn’t sure the show will be anything different from legal dramas that have come before. Every network has their fair share of courtroom-based dramas, and Lowry says they “are such a well-worn TV backdrop that in order to stand out from the pack, some characters beyond Davis’s had better pop.” Although creator Shonda Rhimes is most well known for Scandal and even earlier Grey’s Anatomy, Lowry believes that Rhimes and Davis are the ultimate “dream team,” and if anyone, these two ladies can be “the cherry on top of ABC’s Thursday-night all-Shonda Rhimes sundae.”

“Director Antoine Fuqua’s reboot of The Equalizer bears little resemblance to the 1980s TV series it's based on,” says Crosswalk’s Jeffrey Huston. Not only does the remake completely change the premise, it “plays like your standard run-of-the-mill adult crime thriller,” with unnecessary violence “cloaked in the ‘virtue’ of so-called vigilante justice.” Although the casting in the film is excellent (Denzel Washington is in the lead role), Huston says this doesn’t excuse the “rather ignoble bloodlust” of “of contemporary cinematic comfort food.” The original television series of the same name follows the story of a highly trained C.I.A. assassin who later becomes a “freelance vigilante specializing in payback and pre-emptive violence in defense of the innocent,” explains A.O. Scott of The New York Times. He calls Denzel “one of our leading middle-aged action heroes,” alongside Liam Neeson, of course. Although The Equalizer might be forgettable, and you probably haven’t heard about it, Scott admits that the Fuqua is an effective director, pulling off “action sequences with bluntness and clarity.”

Larisa Kline is an intern with Christianity Today Movies and a student at The King’s College in New York City.

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Culture

The Streaming Roundup: “The Fault in Our Stars” and Getting Away With Murder

Rebecca Calhoun

And a lot more to watch, including a show about a futuristic King Kong.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in 'Romeo + Juliet'

“Some infinites are bigger than other infinites,” and in this case The Fault in our Stars is infinitely available on Amazon Instant Video and any other functioning VOD system. The CT review by Brett McCracken gave it three stars for its nuanced perceptions of suffering and incomprehensible infinity.

If you missed the pilot episode of How to Get Away with Murder, you can catch it on Hulu. And then you can see why this New York Times article raised a lot of Twitter eyebrows last week in anticipation of the premiere.

The Netflix “recently added” section is both on the move and on the prowl. Here is a list of everything Netflix added. It’s longer than the final season of How I Met Your Mother. Some highlights from this week include the 1989 movie version of Phantom of the Opera, the DiCaprio-Danes remake of Romeo + Juliet, and both the original and the director’s fan cut of Bieber’s documentary—Never Say Never.

Variety announced here that Netflix will unleash an original animated kid’s TV series about a giant ape living in San Francisco in 2050 entitled Kong—King of the Apes. Also, Netflix will produce and release four Adam Sandler movies through Happy Madison Productions. Indiewire explains why this is a big deal for the world of feature productions here.

Rebecca Calhoun is an intern with Christianity Today Movies and a student at The King’s College in New York City.

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Culture

The News Roundup: “Exodus” and a New Pixar Trailer

Jessica Gibson

Plus a long-lost Sherlock movie and more.

Pixar's 'Inside Out'

Today, the long-anticipated remake of the apocalypse novel Left Behind opens in theaters to universally damning reviews, though most secular sources went no deeper than calling it amateurish. CT’s Jackson Cuidon affirms that the movie is so shallow it doesn’t invite serious criticism. You can read his full review here.

The other headline in Bible movies this week is the first full-length trailer for Exodus: Gods and Kings, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator-ized take on the story of Moses. The trailer promises a film of a similar tone and scope to what Noah delivered earlier this year. You can watch the trailer here, and read Peter Chattaway’s take on the Bible movie trend as a whole here.

Earlier this week, Pixar released a teaser for their next film, Inside Out. The movie is about a little girl’s personified feelings, and the trailer exemplifies each of the five emotions through clips from past Pixar films. If the movie is as sweet as its trailer, Pixar may have another adorable hit on their hands. Take a look at the trailer here.

Indiewire has a number of interesting news items this week, including the recovery and restoration of the very first Sherlock Holmes movie that’s been lost since its debut in 1916. You can read the full story on that here, and gear up for this month’s must-see indie films with Indiewire’s list here.

Jessica Gibson is an intern with CT Movies and a student at The King’s College in New York City.

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The Rapture Keeps Coming Back

Brett McCracken

Why are movies about the last days still so popular?

Courtesy of Stoney Lake Entertainment

Are Americans more enraptured with the Rapture than ever? Seth Rogen's 2013 apocalypse comedy, This Is the End, poked fun at the concept, while the cinematic "reboot" of Left Behind, starring Nicolas Cage, takes it seriously. The bleak HBO drama The Leftovers, developed by Damon Lindelof (co-creator of Lost), explores what life would be like for those left behind after a Rapture-esque event.

The Rapture is a relatively recent idea in church history, as well as a minor theme in Scripture: Many Bible scholars argue that it's not there at all, while descendants of 19th-century dispensationalists see it in passages like 1 Thessalonians 4:15–17; 1 Corinthians 15:51–55; and John 14:2–3. But it has become a fixture in U.S. pop culture, showing up unexpectedly like a thief in the night.

Big-Budget Destruction

Pop apocalyptic—the larger genre of disaster movies and end-of-the-world scenarios—has been a big business for a long time. It flourished after World War II and during the cold war. Just as Amish romances have provided an evangelical-friendly niche within the larger genre of romance novels, Rapture media allowed Christians to carve out a space within the larger (and quite profitable) genre of apocalyptic. Whereas Amish romance provides a "safer alternative" to bodice-rippers, however, Christian Rapture fare often seems more intent on upping the terror factor than providing toned-down, family-friendly fun.

Take the 1941 evangelistic film The Rapture, produced by Charles Octavia Baptista. In 11 minutes, the film chillingly depicts the chaos to be wrought on earth when the Rapture occurs. The narrator predicts that "speeding trains will plunge unsuspecting passengers into a black eternity as Christian engineers are snatched from the throttle. Operations will be halted midway when believing surgeons are caught up to be forever with the Lord."

Rapture terror hit a new high in 1973 with Thief in the Night. The film combined the tropes of low-budget horror (George Romero's Night of the Living Dead had come out a few years earlier) with dispensationalist anxiety fueled in part by books like Hal Lindsey's The Late, Great Planet Earth. Produced by Russell S. Doughton (The Blob), the 69-minute film terrified audiences and spun off three sequels: A Distant Thunder, Image of the Beast, and The Prodigal Planet.

The Rapture renaissance we enjoy today is probably most indebted to Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins's 16-book Left Behind series (1995–2007), which has sold more than 63 million copies and launched three films as well as video games, parodies, and a 40-installment children's series. The Nicolas Cage treatment of Left Behind is just the latest in a crowded pack of 21st-century Rapture movies. They include Cloud Ten Pictures' Apocalypse franchise, Pure Flix Entertainment's Revelation Road: The Beginning of the End, and the Carman-starring Final: The Rapture, which director Tim Chey said he made to "scare the living daylights out of adult nonbelievers."

While most Christian-made Rapture movies seek to scare nonbelievers into reconsidering Christ, many secular films in the genre aim merely to entertain. Recent comedies such as Rapture-Palooza, The World's End, and the aforementioned This Is the End have mined the apocalypse for laughs.

The ease with which the Rapture has crossed over into secular culture may reflect a broader societal anxiety. The destabilizing effects of two world wars and the cold war, coupled with nuclear fears and worries about technology, infused the 20th century with an existential urgency and expectancy of calamity. When fears of apocalypse—whether by contagion, nuke, robot, zombie, mutated spider, or giant lizard—were everywhere in pop culture, the worldwide disappearance of millions didn't seem farfetched.

It could be, indeed, that the original resonance of the dispensational Rapture among Christians had more to do with the anxious effects of modernity than with its theological merit. "Signs of the times" is a common trope in Rapture narratives, but in a profound sense, the Rapture's popularity is itself a "sign of the times," a byproduct and manifestation of larger societal unease.

Time Is Ticking Away

In dc Talk's early-1990s song "Time Is," the trio sing, "Time is definitely on the go." It's a ubiquitous sentiment in popular culture, and not just among Christians: time is running out. Who would have predicted that in the most secular age in human history—an age in which events are thought to have no ultimate or eternal meaning—a constant sense of apocalyptic dread would loom large?

In A Secular Age, philosopher Charles Taylor talks about the gradual emergence in modernity of a sense of "secular" time as opposed to sacred or "higher" time. In ordinary, secular time, one thing happens after another on a single plane of progression. But before the modern era, "higher times" offered an "organizing field" that gathered, grouped, and imbued ordinary time with meaning. When we lose a sense of the "higher times," writes Taylor, we are cut off from our past and out of touch with our future: "We get lost in our little parcel of time."

The dangers of getting "lost in our little parcel of time" are also noted by media critic Douglas Rushkoff in his book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. Rushkoff argues that 21st-century society is oriented around the present moment. "Narrativity and goals are surrendered to a skewed notion of the real and the immediate; the tweet; the status update," writes Rushkoff. "What we are doing at any given moment becomes all-important."

And yet a byproduct of the focus on the present moment is the rise of what Rushkoff calls "Apocalypto"—a fascination with disaster, doomsday, and zombies. "A seemingly infinite present makes us long for endings, by almost any means necessary."

Our age's "lack of regard for beginnings and endings drives us to impose order on chaos," he writes. "We invent origins and endpoints as a way of bounding our experience and limiting the sense of limbo."

Both Taylor's loss of "higher times" and Rushkoff's burden of the "infinite present" help us understand why we're so compelled by things like the Rapture—or anything apocalyptic. Living in a flattened timescape, we long for moments to take us out of the profane and everyday. In the absence of "higher times," global disasters and narratives of apocalypse stand in as sacred moments that rupture the monotony of secular time. "Where were you when . . . ?" is a question of almost spiritual gravitas for anyone alive on 9/11 or the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Especially since the advent of mass broadcasts of breaking news, we mark time by shared moments of global calamity and terror, existential pauses that give us transcendent perspective.

These are real if perverted expressions of our longing for the "higher" time we've lost, for pivot points in history, for an escape from the present. In a world where there's "nothing new under the sun," where generations come and go "but the earth remains forever" (Ecc. 1:4), we long to be part of an unexpected story, to witness something significant. But must that "something significant" be the earth's fiery end?

Christians of all people need not buy into the prevailing culture's preoccupation with doomsday. Let the world have its apocalyptic versions of the Rapture—Christians have something better. Surely there are movies to be made about not destruction, but resurrection.

Brett McCracken is a film critic for CT and author of Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism and Liberty (Baker Books).

This article appeared in the September, 2014 issue of Christianity Today as "Enraptured".

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How Abortion Stories Overtook Life Ethics

Jen Pollock Michel

Anecdotes aren’t enough to determine morality.

Alan Kotok / Flickr

When we hear defenses of abortion, the examples often involve difficult circumstances. Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator and Democratic candidate for governor, made national news last year for an 11-hour filibuster against a law that would have restricted abortion access. In her recently released memoir, Forgetting to Be Afraid, Davis details her own abortion history. She had ended two pregnancies: the first, because her life was in danger, the second, because the baby had an acute brain abnormality.

In an op-ed piece for The New York Times entitled, “This Is What An Abortion Looks Like,” Merritt Tierce admires Davis’s courage to talk openly about abortion, but she calls Davis’s stories “politically safe.”

“Abortions like [Davis’s] represent the basic currency of the debate,” writes Tierce. “These are… the standard against which all other abortion stories must be gauged…. No rational person could be anything but sympathetic.”

Tierce concludes that abortion need not be justified by tragic stories and trauma. Having twice elected to abort, she describes the banality of those decisions: “You do things you regret or don’t understand and then you make other choices because life keeps going forward. Or you do something out of love and then, through biology or accident, it goes inexplicably wrong, and you do what you can to cope.”

If health risks and poverty—and in more troubling cases, rape and incest—make for sympathetic headlines in the moral debate over terminating pregnancy, Tierce argues that they do not ultimately decide the ethics of abortion. “We [must] grant to each woman the right to make and do with her body what she will. Regardless of whether or not a compelling story is on offer.”

As it turns out, her unabashed defense of abortion works as well against it. If stories—and sympathy—are unnecessary for defending abortion, they may be equally as unnecessary for denouncing it.

While I do not support abortion, I feel compassion for the stories of many women who choose abortion—stories that could have easily been mine. I was 15 when I started having sex, and contraception was often an afterthought. Had our episodic love and love-making made a real-life baby, what would my boyfriend and I have done? Scraped together a wad of cash from our respective jobs at the dry cleaners and grocery store and driven to a clinic? What would our parents have advised, had we told them, especially after his dad had been the one to slip him the condom? Would we have kept the baby, married at 16? One narrative twist, and a story can end so differently.

Like most Americans, I lament the situational realities behind “choice.” Twenty-eight percent of Americans think abortion should be legal under any circumstance (and 21% illegal); half support the legality of abortion “only under certain circumstances.” To my surprise, according to Gallup, these numbers have not substantially shifted from 1975, when 54 percent of Americans supported abortion “only under certain circumstances.” When it comes to abortion, we have been and continue to be a people of conflicted conscience.

If Americans struggle with the fundamental morality of abortion, we are sympathetically moved by the stories of struggling women who elect to terminate their pregnancies. In a recent article in The Atlantic, studies show that rates of abortion among Hispanic and African American women are significantly higher than the national average.

“There are a multitude of reasons, and we don’t understand what’s going on,” explained Christine Dehlendorf, a professor of family and community medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “But ultimately I think it’s about structural determinants—economic reasons, issues related to racism, differences in opportunities, differences in social and historical context.”

Dehlendorf points to systemic injustices as a driving factor in abortion rates. As a Christian, that’s something I can’t ignore. It reminds me of a story a friend told me several years back. She and her husband live and work in an impoverished, African American neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. One summer, at a neighborhood event, my friend learned that a middle-aged woman up the street was pregnant with twins. Later that fall, the two women ran into each other again, and it was obvious to my friend that her neighbor was no longer pregnant. When my friend inquired after what had happened, the women (a believer) confessed she’d had an abortion. Two more mouths to feed had seemed to her and her husband too daunting a reality.

If the poor and the marginalized are choosing abortion at higher rates than the rest of the country, isn’t opposition to abortion decidedly unsympathetic, even cruel? Pro-life supporters are often meant to feel this way. Yet this is the clarity that Tierce has really achieved in her piece, as startling as her logic originally seems. It is not the stories of abortion that must necessarily decide the ethics of abortion. For the Christian, belief in the value of every human life—and the moral imperative to defend it—is derived biblically. There are limits to human sympathy, and we cannot make all of our moral decisions anecdotally.

If the stories are heartbreaking, then let our hearts break. The God we serve did not remain indifferent to an unjust world but incarnated himself and entered it. We are the “little Christs,” whose response to suffering is to wordlessly weep, even to lament the god-forsakenness of reality as we know it. This much we know: the brokenness behind abortion—abuse, victimization, poverty, racial discrimination, sin—matters to the Trinitarian God. It cost him his life.

And though we can and should sympathize with the broken stories behind abortion, though we will love the women who choose to terminate a pregnancy, it can yet still be possible to oppose abortion. This is not calloused, and it is not elitist. Rather, it’s as consistent as Tierce, a fierce advocate of abortion rights, has asked us to be.

Stories may move us—but sympathy doesn’t have to decide our final position in the moral conversation regarding abortion.

This article was originally published as part of Her.Meneutics, Christianity Today's blog for women.

- More from Jen Pollock Michel

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A Broader Call

Cross-Cultural Connection

The Perpetual Foreigner Syndrome

Speaking As One Voice

Living with Painful Pasts

Reaching the Fringes and the Center

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A promising start

Signs of trouble

Letting go

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Caveat Spectator

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Big-Budget Destruction

Time Is Ticking Away

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