Glory to God in the Highest Calling

Motherhood is honorable, but being a disciple of Jesus is every woman’s primary biblical vocation.

Christ in the House of Martha and Mary by Henryk Siemiradzki

WikiMedia Commons

One Sunday when my son was a baby, a woman approached me (Seana) at church. I dreamed of changing the world for Jesus, but I had exchanged traveling the globe as a missionary for perpetually changing diapers and scrubbing dishes in the suburbs. The woman declared, “I am so glad you are staying home. Motherhood is your highest calling.”

At the time, this felt true—I’d left a career I loved to stay home with my child. Yet this woman had seemed to shrink all my gifting and capacity for serving Christ into one role and season of life. And sadly, I held on to that comment as if it had come from the mouth of God. So when motherhood with a neurodiverse child failed to fulfill my longing for wholeness (as some Christian parenting books taught me it would), I felt I was failing both as a woman and as a Christian.

Early on in my married years, I (Sandra) identified more with Ramah, convulsing over the innocents that Herod ordered killed, than with the little town of Bethlehem. For ten Christmases, infertility and multiple pregnancy losses attuned my heart to “Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more” (Jer. 31:15–22; Matt. 2:16–18).

My husband and I had adoptions fall through on December 22—two years in a row. So amid the aroma of gingerbread and the sight of twinkling lights, we shut the door to the nursery and tiptoed away, exchanging dreams for empty arms. The deepest pain of all came from my failure to live out what I perceived then as God’s highest calling for every woman: motherhood.

And after the successful adoption of our daughter, who is now a mom herself, I wore the hat of a work-from-home mom all through her childhood. As my daughter grew, I needed to revisit where and why I owned the view that God had only a maternal vision for godly womanhood.

Over the years, the two of us—a work-from-home mom of three and a seminary professor and grandmother—wrestled with these important questions: Is motherhood truly every Christian woman’s highest calling? How did Christ view motherhood? Was motherhood the highest calling for women in the early church? If motherhood isn’t a woman’s highest calling, what is?

In the process, we’ve read stories of ancient Christian women and explored how the biblical ideal of womanhood differs from some of the heralded visions of motherhood in modern evangelicalism. And what we found was that both the Scriptures and early church history can help realign some of our off-kilter views about a Christian woman’s “highest calling” in the modern church.

Let’s start with the universal female ancestor, Eve, whom the Bible hails as “the mother of all living” (Gen. 3:20). In the first chapters of the Genesis narrative, we see how God creates our first parents to rule together and to fill the earth with image-bearing worshipers of God (Gen. 1:28). In this way, male and female humans shared the same mandates of ruling and multiplying.

Although parenthood was part of how Adam and Eve were meant to glorify God and partner together to multiply image bearers, nowhere in these early chapters of Genesis do we find language that suggests having children is a woman’s highest good. And in the New Testament, instead of finding a reiteration of the Genesis mandate to multiply humans, we find Christ issuing a similar mandate to multiply worshipers by making disciples (Matt. 28:18–20).

Now, let’s turn to the next most famous mother of all time, who birthed the God made flesh—Mary, “the God bearer,” as the Council of Ephesus (AD 431) called her.

In Luke’s gospel, the angel Gabriel visits Mary and prophesies that she would birth a child conceived by the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:30–33). Mary’s motherhood to Jesus throughout his life was an honor which played a vital role in the provision of salvation for all of humanity. It’s clear that God ordained parenthood, including Joseph’s role, as part of his miraculous plan.

As we continue following the story of Mary, we arrive at the scene where Jesus is grown and ministering to a crowd of people. As he is teaching about the kingdom and speaking against the legalism of the Pharisees, someone in the crowd interrupts him to say, “Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.”

In response, Jesus asks, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Pointing to his disciples, he says, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Matt. 12:47–50).

By this, some people might think Jesus is dismissing or putting his mother down. But by Jesus’ own definition, Mary would have been included in the group of family members he affirms. Did she not tell Gabriel, “I am the Lord’s servant. … May your word to me be fulfilled”? (Luke 1:38). Did she, of all people, not agree to align her will with God’s will?

Still, Jesus reframed what is most valuable in his kingdom, which is not a natural relationship bound by blood—though family can be one of God’s greatest blessings—but rather a mutual kinship defined by obedience to the will of God. When seen in this light, Mary’s calling of motherhood to Jesus was secondary to her ultimate belief in and obedience to her Son.

Then there’s the familiar story of Mary and Martha. Martha is doing all the traditionally feminine tasks, while her sister, Mary, sits at Jesus’s feet—taking the bodily stance of a first-century disciple before a rabbi. Martha accosts Mary, expecting her help with domestic tasks. But instead of sending her back to the kitchen, Jesus affirms Mary for choosing “what is better” (Luke 10:42).

From the Lord’s own example, we learn that the highest calling of any person—regardless of marital or parental status—is to follow him. And the highest calling of a disciple is not to make children but to make disciples (Matt. 28:18–20). Sometimes the two will overlap—for example, both of us have labored to disciple our children in the faith. But our disciple making extends far beyond hearth and home into building up the church to fulfill its calling as the body of Christ.

In her article for Christianity Today, Jeannie Whitlock writes about how her birthing a child reminded her of the church: “Our bodies are as crucial to God’s plan as Mary’s was. Like Mary, whether single, married, parents, or otherwise, we are called to bear Christ’s life into the world.”

Paul honors many women for their faithfulness to the gospel. Of the 29 people Paul greets in his letter to the Romans, 10 of them are women. We find names like Phoebe—deacon of the church in Cenchrea—and Prisca, or Priscilla (more about her later). We read about another Mary, who some believe refers to Mary Magdalene. There was also Junia, prominent among the apostles, and Julia, relative of Philologus. Tryphena and Tryphosa were workers in the Lord. Paul honors both Nereus’s sister and Rufus’s mother, who was like a mother to Paul.

Of these ten, only one was honored for her biological motherhood, yet all were recognized for their faithful service in the kingdom.

The apostle Paul encourages young widows to marry, to have children, and to manage their homes (1 Tim. 5:14). He writes that “it is better to marry than to burn with passion” (1 Cor. 7:9). He also honors the faithfulness of Timothy’s mother and grandmother (2 Tim. 1:5). Yet nowhere does he hint at marriage or motherhood being a woman’s highest calling. In fact, in his letter to the Corinthians, Paul famously encourages believers to remain single for the work of the gospel (1 Cor. 7:8–9). For him, “to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Phil. 1:21), and so it should be for us.

To understand how women in the first-century church viewed their callings, we turned to the Book of Acts. There, we found that when women appeared in the text, it wasn’t because of their roles as mothers but because of their gifts to strengthen the church. Priscilla, together with her husband Aquila, taught the skilled preacher Apollos (Acts 18:24–26). If Lydia, a prominent businesswoman, was a parent, the text does not mention it. Instead, she was recognized for leading her household to faith and for her hospitality (16:14–15). And the unmarried daughters of Phillip were mentioned for their exercise of the gift of prophesy (21:8–9).

If motherhood were truly a woman’s highest calling, wouldn’t we find the women of Scripture honored foremost for their motherhood rather than for their service to God’s kingdom? But that is not what we find. Yes, Christian women who married and had children were called to love and care for their families well, yet this work was seen not as their primary calling but part of fulfilling their ultimate call to follow Christ.

When Paul lists qualifications for an older woman to be placed on the “list of widows” cared for by the church, he advises she be “well known for her good deeds, such as bringing up children, showing hospitality, washing the feet of the Lord’s people, helping those in trouble and devoting herself to all kinds of good deeds” (1 Tim. 5:9–10). Of that list, only one point is related to motherhood.

Paul also doesn’t specify that the children the widows raise need to be biological (most children would be fully grown by the time their mothers reached the prescribed age of 60!). In fact, many of the widows who are “really in need and left all alone” are likely not biological mothers at all, since Paul says those with children and grandchildren should be cared for by their own families instead of the church (v. 5).

The apostolic instruction was so clear in this and other passages that male leaders in the early church acknowledged a legitimate office (clergy) for an “order of widows” in the Apostolic Consitutions, an ancient manual of church order used in the third century.

We see the same pattern of discipleship over motherhood in early church history as well. When a third-century noblewoman, Perpetua, became a Christian through the testimony of her servant, Felicitas, the authorities threw them into prison. The young Perpetua had an infant son, whom she was allowed to nurse in her cell. But when she was told to either recant her faith in Christ and worship the Roman gods or die and leave her child motherless, she chose death over her child because her highest allegiance was to Christ. While in prison with her, Felicitas gave birth and also chose to leave her infant in the care of her local Christian community rather than recant. Imagine the gut-wrenching pain of these decisions!

Perpetua’s anguished father even tried changing her mind multiple times, but she responded that only by devoting herself to Christ and his glory would she remain a “perpetual daughter.” If motherhood were truly a Christian woman’s highest calling in the early church, such heroines of our faith would or should have chosen their marriage and family over dying for Christ.

Such stories inform how I (Sandra) pray for and care for my daughter, her husband, and their daughter, and how I (Seana) find fresh perspective on motherhood with my kids still at home. Following Christ led our mothers of the faith into the arena, whereas following Christ leads me to my kitchen sink, laundry piles, and dinner discussions about the Marvel universe. Whatever arena God leads us into, we sacrifice ourselves to serve the Lord as our highest calling. And regardless of parental status, all women in our churches today can be nurturers of faith.

Especially in this holiday season, when we hear someone ask the dreaded question “When will you have children?” of our childless friend, will we intervene? When we see an exhausted mother, will we choose to say something besides “Motherhood is your highest calling”? Or when we feel we must bake dozens of cookies, attend every festival, and decorate the tree as if it’s on display at Magnolia Market to be the perfect mother—will we miss attuning our hearts to the presence of our Savior and serving him? Will we be like Martha, fixated on fulfilling all that our culture expects of us as women, or will we prioritize sitting at the feet of Jesus like Mary?

Ever since the angel’s announcement to Mary, following Christ has been every woman’s highest calling. And whether or not we end up being a wife or a mother, we can all become perpetual daughters of God.

Sandra Glahn is a professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, president of the Evangelical Press Association, and the author or coauthor of more than 25 books. Seana Scott is a writer, speaker, and content creator passionate about disciple making.

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Culture

Advent Doesn’t Have to Make Sense

Christian Gonzalez Ho

As a curator, I love how contemporary art makes the world feel strange. So does the story of Jesus’ birth.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek

The first piece of art I bring my art-history students to see in the museum is a glass cube, four feet by four feet. Square sheets of glass infused with metal make the sculpture simultaneously reflective and transparent. The cube has a polarizing effect on visitors, inciting responses that range from confusion to curiosity to contempt. I invite my students: “Turn your attention to the cube. Observe it for two full minutes.” That’s an eternity to look at something that seems to resist meaning.

By the time the exercise has finished, the students can’t wait to talk about the work, the way it refracts color and light. Our conversation is punctuated by laughter. The two-minute exercise underscores art historian Jennifer Roberts’ adage: “Just because you have looked at something doesn’t mean that you have seen it.”

Looking at art is confusing. Looking at contemporary art can be especially confusing. That remains true for me in my work as an art historian and curator. But I’m also assured: When I persevere in being with a piece, it imparts the “eyes to see and ears to hear” it.

In the meantime, the confusion caused by good art is valuable. It challenges what we think we know and how we know it. It resists our authority, not by exerting equal and opposite force but by striking us obliquely, throwing us off balance. Good work defamiliarizes us; it makes the world feel strange, new, and other—sometimes frighteningly so.

Earlier this year, I started curating a show for my university’s museum, featuring Larry Bell’s glass cube among other works. I sensed that these pieces had something important to teach me about Advent, even though they aren’t illustrative like the Merode Altarpiece or even made by Christian artists.

Anderson Collection at Stanford University, Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, and Mary Patricia Anderson Pence 2014.1.090

Larry Bell, Glass Cube, 1984, metal film on glass and chrome-plated brass 36 x 36 x 36 in.

Immured by two millennia of history, Advent often strikes me like that cube—complete, hermetically sealed, indifferent to my presence. But when I look into the glass, I find myself becoming remade in its reflection, startled by its alterity. It causes me to see myself, others, and the world differently. So too with Advent.

“Do not fear”: It’s one of the most repeated phrases in the accounts of the birth of Jesus. The angelic prologue is not followed by “I will explain everything to you” or “Everything will be okay.” Rather, it precedes unmitigated uncertainty. “Do not fear” was an invitation to see with the eyes of the Spirit rather than look with the logic of humanity. Zechariah, Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds were all invited to exchange their earthly understandings for the knowledge of eternity.

“Do not fear” has too often been translated into the American ideology of “happily ever after.” But in context, it was spoken by a terrifying, numinous being. It was a warning: Brace yourself to witness the eternal God in the form of a human baby.

Near the glass cube in the gallery hall loops a video made by the sculptor and dancer Nick Cave. His “sound suits” are composed of buttons, sequins, and fishing bobbers of all sizes, colors, and shapes, plus bundles of twigs and antique figurines. The result is a collection of surreal sculptural figures exploding with colors and textures, exuding an electric energy.

Nick Cave made his suits in response to the 1991 beating of Rodney King. “As a young Black male, you know, I was … feeling dismissed, discarded,” he reflected. “I was just trying to process that, and, you know, what does that mean. … I found myself one day in the park, and I looked down on the ground, and there was this twig. And, I don’t know, I just started collecting these twigs. … I sort of brought them back to the studio and started to build this object.” When he donned the suit, he noted its shimmering sounds and named it accordingly.

Discarded objects become joyful revelations. Despised, weak, and rejected materials become a strange conduit of hope, a profound illustration of 1 Corinthians 1:27. This is the kind of artwork that requires us to set aside our sensemaking—the suits are weird!—in order to see splendor.

Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune / Getty

Soundsuits by Nick Cave

During Advent, God defies earthly power and reason; he uses a baby born into dirty straw to bring about redemption. We are reminded that we must surrender our ways of looking and knowing if we hope to see the kingdom of God (John 3:3).

Of course, it’s not just contemporary art that can help us understand Advent more clearly. Canonical works have something to teach us, too, if we can get past the layers of commentary and critique and see them anew.

Caravaggio’s Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1602) isn’t included in my show. (The “secular” version is in a German gallery.) And once again, it’s not a Nativity scene. But it always makes me think about Advent too.

It’s hard now to comprehend how disruptive Caravaggio’s work was; Nicolas Poussin, one of the greatest painters of the 17th century, went so far as to say that the Italian painter “came into the world to destroy painting.” In the Incredulity, Caravaggio offers up a surrealist representation of the interaction between Christ and Thomas, taken from John 20:24–27. Christ guides Thomas’s hand into the wound in his side.

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The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio

I find this the most moving, compelling metaphor for what happens when we begin to see an artwork—as we give our attention to it, we are drawn into its depth. Christ does not point the confused Thomas toward a scar that will satisfy his intellectual doubts. Instead, Thomas is being drawn into Christ’s side, toward a terrifying and gaping darkness.

In this version of the painting, Caravaggio renders the wound as neither past nor present but an eternal mystery—the lamb slain before the foundations of the earth, a God incarnated as a child.

My prayer is to see Advent as God does: to surrender to its wisdom and enter into its wonder.

Christian Gonzalez Ho is earning his PhD in art history at Stanford University and is the cofounder of Estuaries.

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Church Life

Advent Calls Us Out of Our Despair

Joni Eareckson Tada

Sitting in the dark helps us truly appreciate the light.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

As a child growing up in the Reformed Episcopal Church, the first day of Advent was lovely yet a little strange. At the evening church service, we sang the most mournful hymns, with lines like “O come, O come, Immanuel, / And ransom captive Israel.” They were always songs that moaned about our sin and captivity and, well, the hymns sounded gloomy.

And so did the Advent Scriptures—like this Advent reading from Isaiah 30:1, which says, “‘Woe to the obstinate children,’ declares the Lord, ‘to those who carry out plans that are not mine, forming an alliance, but not by my Spirit, heaping sin upon sin.’” I was only a little girl, but I thought this was a very odd way to begin the Christmas season.

How could we possibly appreciate the gift of Jesus Christ as Savior of our sins unless first—like right now—we take time to consider what we need to be saved from?

God wants us to understand the depth and breadth of our transgressions against him and come face to face with the utter lostness of our plight. He wants us to own our sad and sorry situation, understanding that our sin offends him and that his wrath is upon us. That without Jesus we are held captive by the Enemy.

I know what it’s like to be held captive by a sad and sorry situation. Decades ago, when a reckless dive left me paralyzed at the age of 17, my world went dark. My despair seemed like a bottomless pit. I was lost to life as I once knew it—riding horses, playing sports, and hiking through the beauty of God’s creation. But now? I felt enslaved by a life sentence of quadriplegia.  

Lying in the rehabilitation hospital after my injury, I wanted to end my life. Unable to do even that, I determined to end my life spiritually. I told my mother to shut the door and close the drapes. I wanted to shut out the light—shut out the whole world. I was lost.

Only when we appreciate the fact that we are lost can we fully celebrate being found. Perhaps that’s why James says, “Grieve, mourn, and wail” over your sin and God “will lift you up” (4:9,10). Only when we face our lostness can we say,

Joy to the world! The Lord is come.

Let earth receive her King.

Let every heart prepare him room,

and heaven and nature sing!

There is a method to the mystery of Advent. As each week of Advent progresses, the Scriptures—and the hymns—turn from somber to joyful. They become lighter, happier, and full of hope.

Even Scripture’s tone changes in the hope-filled call of Isaiah 40:3: “Prepare the way for the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” And in Isaiah 41:10, God says to the captives, “Do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”

The journey through Advent teaches us that we need Jesus. The Light of the World is coming to set the captive free.

As December 25 draws near, it is time to reflect on the manner in which we wait for Christ in the darkness of our captivity and respond to his eternal light.

We all have different responses to the incarnation of the Son of God. Are you searching? Wanting to draw closer? Or are you a little indifferent—almost uncaring that another Christmas is here already?

People likely responded similarly to Jesus’ arrival. Think of the answers people gave when they heard of what had happened in Bethlehem. There were many, like the innkeeper, who couldn’t have cared less. He had things to do, pots to wash, beds to change, stuff to pick up at the market.

Other people were cruel and even malicious, like Herod. He did everything in his power to stop the celebration, hunt down this so-called King, and put an end to the events God had already put into play.

Still others were frightened, even terrified—like the shepherds. It was only after the angels bent over backward to explain what was going on that their fears were put to rest.

Other people were curious, like the wise men—the searching types. They sincerely wanted to know what was going on. They sensed that something different, something important, had happened. And they knew, without even having the Bible to guide them, that it would mean a big change for the world.

Some people waited, like Simeon in the temple. Other people hoped, like Anna the prophetess. Still others like Mary and Joseph knew the answer to “What Child Is This?” and worshiped this little one sleeping in his mother’s arms.

Do you, like the innkeeper, just have too much to do to take time to truly celebrate Christ’s birth? Do you, like the innkeeper, just have too much to do to take time to truly celebrate Christ’s birth? Or like Mary and Joseph, do you take time to stare out from the gloom of your daily struggles to contemplate the brilliance of God’s perfect light?

The miracle that has illuminated human history also illuminates our weary hearts. The God who overflows the universe has poured himself into baby flesh. The high and holy who shrouds himself in his own dazzling light, whose chariot is the wind and fire, who crosses the heavens on storms and lightning, who shakes the foundation of the earth—he has entered history. Jesus has touched down on this chaotic, fragile, and noisy planet. You can hear his Christmas footsteps if you stop, look, listen, and be still.

Tonight, bundle up and head outside. Gaze at the stars and ponder: The same night sky overhead peered down on that Christmas miracle over 2,000 years ago. And then, if you can, sing, “All is calm, all is bright,” deep from your soul.

Because of that night in Bethlehem, the Spirit of the Lord has invaded your heart and taken up residence in your very soul. He boldly intruded into your sin, calling it what it is and challenging you to leave it behind.

So come, oh, come, Immanuel! This glorious Advent season, may we realize afresh our need of you, our Savior, and may we own our desperate condition. Only then can we truly have a very merry Christmas.

Joni Eareckson Tada is the founder and chief executive officer of Joni and Friends, a Christian nonprofit ministry committed to reaching and serving people with disabilities with practical help and the saving love of Jesus.

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Books

Excerpt

There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Proper’ Christmas Carol

Andrew Gant

As we learn from the surprising journeys of several holiday classics, the term defies easy definition.

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

One Christmas I found myself on London’s Oxford Street, admiring the twinkly decorations and listening to a piped version of “Jingle Bells.” In Chinese.

Our Christmas songs and carols turn up in some surprising places. They come from some surprising places, too. “Ding, Dong! Merrily on High” began life in a French Renaissance dancing manual. The tune of “Good King Wenceslas” was first published in Finland (to completely different words, about priests and virgins, mostly). Certainly, not all of them began life with their seasonal associations attached. Some were born to Christmas, some have achieved Christmas, and some have had Christmas thrust upon them.

For example, every Christmas, you will find yourself singing a song whose original words were about a dead cow and a delinquent ploughboy. The song was heard in a pub in Forest Green, Surrey, in the leafy commuter-belt fringes of London, by the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, and it was sung to him by an old man called Mr. Garman. Vaughan Williams found a use for the tune a few years later when he was given the job of music editor of The English Hymnal. He wanted to include a poem by an American bishop called Phillips Brooks but didn’t know (or didn’t like) the tune that Brooks’s own church organist had written for this text back in Philadelphia. So Vaughan Williams helped himself to Mr. Garman’s folk song. The result—“O Little Town of Bethlehem.”

That’s not the only transatlantic immigrant into our English carol tradition. “We Three Kings” is American. So is “Away in a Manger,” which was first published in the journal of the Universalist movement in Boston. The editors confidently informed their readers that the poem is by Martin Luther. It isn’t: They made that up. They claimed they were celebrating the 400th anniversary of Luther’s birth. They weren’t: They made that up, too (or, at least, got the date wrong).

“O Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Away in a Manger” are both sung today to different tunes on either side of the Atlantic. Many of our best-known carol texts have had many musical partners over the years. Different tunes sometimes represent differences between one denomination and another, or from one village to the next. Sometimes, a carol would be sung to one tune in church and to a different tune in the pub afterward.

Often, tunes turn up in different parts of the UK in slightly different versions. London gives us a good example. The composer John Stainer once heard “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” raggedly sung on the streets of the capital by a tattered band of Dickensian urchins. A little later, the folklorist Cecil Sharp collected the same tune in Cambridgeshire, England. The same, but different: Stainer’s tune has a different first note from Sharp’s. Somebody, once upon a time, traveled those 70 miles singing carols and got that bit wrong, or misremembered it, or changed it. That’s how an oral tradition works. There is no “correct” version. Even today, hymnbooks and carol collections don’t agree on the exact words of “Away in a Manger” or the precise rhythm of “Angels from the Realms of Glory.”

This ability to absorb influences from everywhere and nowhere produces memorable, and often rather odd, results. This partly explains why, for most of its history, the English carol has been an outdoor creature, kept tied up in the churchyard, not allowed to show its muddy face in church. For much of the 18th century, only one carol was permitted in worship, Nahum Tate’s “While Shepherds Watched.” Hymns like “O Come, All Ye Faithful” weren’t granted access until the first half of the 19th century. Even long after that, the idea of singing secular things like wassail songs cheek by jowl with holy writ would have been deeply shocking.

The word carol, too, has had many associations over the centuries. Shakespeare describes a pair of young lovers:

This carol they began that hour …

How that life was but a flower.

The carol sung by this lover and his lass is a springtime love song: It has nothing to do with Christmas, still less church. Some later composers like Gerald Finzi used the term carol for purely instrumental pieces with a songlike character.

Even in a sacred context, the carol was never exclusively a Christmas song—many collections include Easter carols and other varieties, and folk carols like “Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day” have many verses which cover the entire Christian story, often from the creation of the world to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If someone tries to tell you that such and such an item is or isn’t a proper carol, remember that, like so many catchall musical terms, this one really defies precise definition. It captures a huge range of types and influences. That’s part of its appeal.

Tracing the history of our carol tradition can be a bit like trying to sweep up all the stray pine needles when you’ve taken down your Christmas tree: There’s always a corner you find you haven’t reached. There’s really no such thing as the history of the English carol.

But there are phases and themes.

Folk and oral traditions provide the earliest sources. Folk carols appear in manuscript sources from the 13th century on. Familiar items such as “The Boar’s Head Carol” and the various holly-and-ivy carols start turning up in the 15th and early 16th centuries. The explosion of printing in the 16th century saw the advent of the broadside ballad: cheap editions of popular songs, including countless versions of carols and Christmas poems of all kinds, a practice that persisted well into the 19th century. Protestant hymnbooks and schoolbooks give us well-known songs such as “In Dulci Jubilo” and “Personent Hodie.” Eighteenth-century hymn singing added “While Shepherds Watched” and the lyrics of Isaac Watts and John and Charles Wesley.

Up to this point, most written versions of Christmas carols and hymns would have reached their performers as words only, leaving the singers to provide suitable tunes which they already knew and which happened to fit. Together with the vagaries of the oral tradition, the lack of any sort of copyright control, and the willingness of different religious traditions or even different villages to adopt their own local variant of a much-loved song, the idea of any sort of correct or standard version of many of our most traditional items gets thoroughly lost in the undergrowth. In “I Saw Three Ships (Come Sailing In),” the titular vessels have been recorded sailing to Newcastle and up the English Channel. Sometimes the passengers are Jesus and Mary, sometimes Mary and Joseph, occasionally the archangel Michael or the bodies of the three kings on their way to burial in Cologne Cathedral, and sometimes a group of pretty girls.

The intellectual currents of the 19th century brought two main influences to bear on the broad meanderings of our carol tradition. First, scholars and antiquarians started to take folk culture seriously and to collect and write down versions of songs and carols from manuscripts, ballad sheets, and their own encounters with carolers. As the 19th century moved into the 20th, their work was continued in important books edited and collected by, among many others, John Stainer, Sabine Baring-Gould, Lucy Broadwood, Cecil Sharp, J. A. Fuller-Maitland, Edith Rickert, George Ratcliffe Woodward, and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Most carols with their roots deep in folk traditions reach the versions we know today in this period: You will probably find yourself singing Stainer’s “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” this Christmas, but his setting preserves only one version among countless possible variants of detail. The compiler exercises an element of choice as well as scholarship. It is a rich and fascinating process.

The second strand of 19th-century thought to feed fatly into what we sing and hear today was the tradition of churchmanship around the Oxford Movement and High-Church Anglicanism. Alongside its theological tracts, the movement gloried in a theatrical style of worship with plenty of ceremony and lots of music. At the same time, its message of social inclusivity gave rise to an explosion in parish choirs and in hymns for congregations to sing.

Tunes could be drawn from wherever a good melody was to be found. The muscular, high-minded, high-collared clergymen who led this revival put new words to melodies they found in old books (as in “Good King Wenceslas” and “Ding, Dong! Merrily”). They edited and translated items from all sorts of traditions, turning the Catholic torch song “Adeste Fideles” into “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and using Lutheran chorales as inspiration for songs like “Good Christian Men, Rejoice.” They borrowed and bolted together art-music and nonconformist lyrics (think “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing”), as well as writing many pieces of their own.

These habits—gleaning in the highways and byways of folk and liturgical traditions and composing new items to fit into that tradition—meet in hybrids like “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” a new poem married to an old folk melody.

Next, poets and composers wrote new songs, but in a deliberately archaic style to match the faux-medieval and Victorian sensibility which had so thoroughly colonized the English carol tradition with songs like “In the Bleak Midwinter.” Many of our most cherished moments of Christmas magic have their roots in the fireside imaginings of Victorians like Christina Rossetti and George Ratcliffe Woodward. (There are no frosty winds in Luke’s gospel.)

The next time you clamber to your feet from some buttock-numbing pew or cheap plastic chair to hear once again those familiar old tunes banged out on a wheezy organ or cracked school piano, remember just how English this most English of traditions actually is: not very. Remember the American Phillips Brooks, finding peace from the horrors of the Civil War in the Holy Land at the birthplace of Christ, where the silent stars go by. Remember the dead cow and the naughty ploughboy, carried off to hell by a genie in a puff of blue smoke—all very festive. Remember Mr. Garman of Forest Green, Surrey.

And what about “Jingle Bells”? That one’s American, too, composed by a man who ran away to sea in a whaling ship at age 14, lost everything in the Gold Rush of 1849, and was the uncle of the founder of the J. P. Morgan banking house (more than one cowboy in that family, then). A carol used to be just a party song about love, keeping warm, or having a good time. “Jingle Bells” can surely claim its place in that tradition.

This wonderful, rich musical pudding gives us a unique insight into what makes us who we are. Even more importantly, it gives us lots of great songs. Happy Christmas.

Andrew Gant is a composer, conductor, and lecturer in music at St. Peter’s College at the University of Oxford. This article is adapted from his book Deck the Hall: The Stories of our Favourite Christmas Carols ©Hodder Faith. This article may not be reproduced for any other use without permission.

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Theology

The Star of Bethlehem Is a Zodiac Killer

Russell Moore

Editor in Chief

How Christmas upends everything that draws our culture to astrology.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

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

Not long ago, a Christian economist from India mentioned that he was part of an unusual coalition. The group ranged from atheists to believers, from astronomers and physicists to religious leaders, all seeking to debunk astrology in their home country. This was not some remnant of old Eastern superstition, as most Western secularists would assume. The hunger for horoscopes was largely, he said, a cultural import—from North America. This should not surprise us.

In her book of several years ago, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, Tara Isabella Burton points to studies showing that 40 percent of those who say they have no religious affiliation believe in psychics and that 32 percent say they believe in astrology. Burton argues that secularization does not mean an abandonment of spiritual beliefs and practices but a “remixing” of them.

We can see that fascination with the role of stars in human lives in recent fictional explorations of the meaning of life. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s 2021 novel The Morning Star sets a series of family conflicts and personal crises against the context of a mysterious, foreboding star in the night sky. A similar story is the backdrop of Sarah Perry’s 2024 novel Enlightenment, which is about, of all things, a deconstructing English Calvinistic Baptist who questions whether a comet is controlling his fate. He finds purpose in a combination of physics and a kind of astrology.

Perry told interviewers that her editors insisted she explain theological concepts like predestination and providence in plainer terms for readers. One assumes the editors took it for granted that readers would need little explanation, on the other hand, for the kind of fatalism that is grounded in reading the stars.

Astrology is, of course, an ancient practice, but it is perfectly fitted for this age. In his Confessions, Augustine argued that astrology was a way to justify one’s sin without seeking mercy from God. The astrologers could say, “The cause of your sinning was fixed unchangeably by the heavens” and “The planet Venus (or Saturn or Mars) has done this,” Augustine wrote, “meaning that man, made up of flesh and blood and proud corruption, is free from fault and that the creator and ruler of the sky and the stars must bear the blame.”

We humans do indeed wish to self-justify our guilt, but I think there’s an added pull to astrology that is different from that of ancient times.

We now have choices every day that our ancestors never imagined. Up until very recently, a high school career counselor would have made no sense. In some ways, the same is true of other big choices—who a person marries, for instance, or where one lives. But all these are fraught with possibilities of making the wrong choice. Why should you trust your 19- or 20-year-old self to make decisions that will define not just your life but the generations after you?

Pierce Moffett, a character in John Crowley’s Aegypt series of novels, realizes that clairvoyance and astrology are about “assenting that the cosmos was in some sense a story—that the universe was a cosmos.” He concludes that the search for harmonies and directions for the future is ultimately about providing “Cliff’s Notes to the plots of their own lives.”

Faced with the fear of wrecking one’s future—or the regret of fearing one has already done so—who would not want a shorthand way to find that plotline? That is especially true when an entire global culture seems plagued by anxiety, the kind that philosopher Hartmut Rosa describes as the simultaneous expectation of being in control of everything while feeling that everything is out of control.

When a person feels dominated by a fate outside of one’s control, there’s comfort in believing that fate is controlled by our Zodiac sign. At least then, one reasons, we can kind of see what’s coming.

The wise men of the Gospel of Matthew’s birth narrative were Eastern star-readers, discerning from the night sky a sign of the coming of Israel’s prophesied king (Matt. 2:1–2). When they calculated by the star the location of the Christ child, Matthew tells us that they “rejoiced exceedingly with great joy” and worshiped Jesus when they found him (Matt. 2:10–11, ESV throughout).

At first glance, the guidance of the Magi might lead us to conclude that we too should seek out those who can read constellations. But the story of Jesus upends all that.

The ancient prophecy—“I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near; a star shall come out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel” (Num. 24:17)—also originated with a frustrated occultist. Balaam was hired by the warlord Balak to place a curse on Israel—a curse God kept turning into a blessing that would include the prophecy of Jacob’s dawning star.

The apostle Paul wrote little about what we call “the Christmas story,” with the exception of such brief references as this one: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law” (Gal. 4:4). He did this to free us from slavery—slavery to “the Law” but also to what he calls “the elementary principles of the world” (v. 3).

The pull, Paul wrote to the church at Colossae, was to return to captivity to these “elemental spirits of the world” (Col. 2:8). The ancients were not stupid to believe themselves to be trapped by forces outside their control—the “elements” of a universe that ultimately kill us all. The problem is not just that people feel this kind of fatalism, but that we actually want it.

“Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those that by nature are not gods,” Paul wrote. “But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world, whose slaves you want to be once more?” (Gal. 4:8–9).

Whether it’s with a “Well, what are you gonna do?” resignation or with an attempt to channel the uncontrollable forces we believe are throwing us around, we, left to ourselves, would rather have a story written for us by fate or destiny or charts or graphs—or even a legal code from the Bible—than contemplate the dark possibility that there is no story at all, just a random, meaningless void.

A certain kind of rationalist laughs at the “backwardness” of those who read their horoscopes. But there’s little difference between that kind of superstition and the kind of techno-utopianism that rests the future on, say, “terra-forming” Mars or downloading human consciousness to the cloud.

We don’t find freedom from that kind of fate-slavery by mastering the elements or, even worse, by mastering the Creator of the elements. We don’t find it by becoming as smart as “the universe” or by learning how to harness it—either by magic or technology. We find freedom, instead, as children and heirs of the Father who “sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Gal. 4:6).

In other words, we find freedom not by becoming Magi, much less King Herod attempting to channel that kind of power to protect himself. We find freedom when, joined in union with Christ, we cry out in dependence not on an impersonal universe but on a Father who loves us.

By losing your need for control—even the illusory control of predicting your future—you can count the future of Jesus as your future. His “destiny,” if you will, becomes your own. By losing your life, you can find it.

Maybe the star on top of every Christmas tree you see this year will remind you of this: that the star itself can’t help you as you grapple with a past you might regret or a future you might fear.

The person checking the horoscope app next to you in the coffee shop is not a flake or a fool. They are trying to find a story that makes sense. That way won’t get them there. But God has been known to redirect people to the real story—the story that became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.

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

News

As Malibu Burns, Pepperdine Withstands the Fire

Kate Shellnutt

University president praises the community’s “calm resilience” as students and staff shelter in place in fireproof buildings.

The Phillips Theme Tower at Pepperdine University was surrounded by fire on Tuesday.

Jae C. Hong / AP

The sky glowed orange and smoky through the floor-to-ceiling library windows at Pepperdine University, where students spent two nights in a row as flames licked over the hilltops along the Malibu campus.

During the final days before winter break, a 2,800-acre wildfire forced the Christian university to issue shelter-in-place orders Monday night and again Tuesday.

Around 3,000 people—undergrads in backpacks, hoodies, and N-95 masks, along with other members of the university community—waited out the blaze in fireproofed campus buildings, including Payson Library, the Tyler Campus Center, and the dining facility, Waves Café.

Student reporter Gabrielle Salgado told The New York Times that it was hard to sleep in the library on Monday. Some students played games or studied. By morning, the rest of the week’s exams had been canceled.

Before they were ordered to take shelter Monday night, some students with cars and faculty members had rushed to evacuate on their own, and some were able to navigate road closures to make their way out on Tuesday morning.

But by Tuesday afternoon, the university reported that the fire had returned. It burned down a ridge to the road along campus’s perimeter, though officials hadn’t seen any significant damage to buildings.

The iconic tower displaying a cross at the school’s entrance also glowed as the land around it burned.

University president Jim Gash moved between emergency operations meetings and the shelter areas, where he said students were “supporting each other and lifting one another up in prayer.” He praised the “calm resilience” of the Pepperdine community.

“When we are tested, we lean on our faith, rely upon our planning, and rally alongside one another,” Gash said in a statement.

Due to the frequency of wildfires in the region and the congestion along the nearby Pacific Coast Highway, Pepperdine’s campus was built to withstand such blazes. The school developed an extensive emergency plan, including stocking meals and supplies, to allow the Malibu campus to shelter in place.

The chief of the Los Angeles County Fire Department said that 1,500 firefighters were battling the Franklin fire, which remained 0 percent contained as of Tuesday night. He estimated that 15 structures in the area had been damaged or destroyed, but there were no reports of fatalities.

“Fire activity around Pepperdine’s Malibu campus has greatly diminished as the Franklin Fire has burned through most of the fuel immediately surrounding campus, but some flames are still visible in small pockets of campus,” the university wrote late Tuesday, as the shelter-in-place order remained overnight. “Firefighters continue to respond to and put out lingering hot spots and protect structures.”

Onlookers following the spread—seeing pictures of the blaze approaching Pepperdine and the students inside buildings on the news—have wondered why the university community is allowed to stay while thousands of neighbors evacuate.

Curbed Los Angeles reported on the school’s fire preparedness in 2018, during the last major wildfire to threaten the area, writing that “Fire is such a way of life at Pepperdine that students and faculty can measure their time at the school in the number of times they’ve participated in the shelter-in-place exercise.” The school’s emergency plans were developed alongside the fire department and are audited by officials.

The plan went into action once again this week. According to the Associated Press, resident assistants heard word of the shelter-in-place orders on Monday and began knocking on dorm room doors in the middle of the night, with no power, to usher students to refuge.

Pepperdine’s executive vice president, Phil Phillips, said in the Curbed piece that “many of our employees are alumni who actually sheltered in place during a fire.” He’s now been through seven.

“What you don’t want is to be stuck,” he told the AP on Tuesday. “Protecting our students, providing for their safety is a moral obligation for us, so we take it really, really seriously.”

As the university posted updates on its Facebook page Tuesday night, commenters offered prayers and recalled the school’s record with wildfires.

“You have always handled these fires with the utmost care. I can attest to that from my experience in the 1985 fire as a new student,” one alumna wrote. Another said that the pictures looked exactly like what he saw while sheltering in place a decade ago.

Curbed pointed out the building design and placement on the 830-acre campus, which was built in the early ’70s: Pepperdine relied on fireproof materials like steel, concrete, stucco, glass, and tile—no exposed wood. The architect’s “Mediterranean modern” style was inspired by the Greek island of Patmos.

The school also clears away dry brush that can accelerate wildfires and collects runoff waste water in a pond, which helicopters used to fight the Franklin fire.

Faculty who evacuated on-campus housing, including humanities professor Jessica Hooten Wilson and law professor Joel Johnson, shared dispatches and asked for prayers.

Jeff Baker, an associate dean at Pepperdine’s law school, offered an update on Tuesday night.

“Long day in Malibu. We remain safely off campus. #FranklinFire returned to Pepperdine tonight from a different angle & burned through the part of campus where our neighborhood is,” he wrote on the social media platform Bluesky. “Pepp reports no structures suffered significant damage. Heroic firefighters have saved our homes again.”

Baker told followers, “We’ve walked this road before,” and that the law clinic was planning to set up pro bono disaster response “right away.”

- More from Kate Shellnutt

News

The Door Is Now Open to Churches in Nepal

Surendra Bajracharya

Seventeen years after the former Hindu kingdom became a secular state, Christians have a pathway to legal recognition.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

Prakash Karki had every reason to be despondent. He had opened a 25-bed hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal, financed by contributions to a local cooperative. But now he was in jail.

Some of the shareholders had insisted that Karki install pictures of Hindu deities in the hospital, but he wished to run the hospital on Christian principles and felt that displaying Hindu gods would go against his faith. As a result, unhappy shareholders turned against Karki, spreading rumors about financial instability at the hospital and prompting other depositors to demand their money back. Unable to repay those amounts immediately, he was hauled into court and received a four-year prison sentence.

Karki was initially discouraged, but after attending a church service in the prison and hearing a message on Job’s faithfulness despite suffering, he found new purpose. He began studying law, assisting inmates with their legal cases, and sharing the gospel. Over 50 of his fellow prisoners came to Christ.

Karki never imagined how God would use his legal studies after his release from prison. Thanks largely to his perseverance and advocacy, Christian churches in Nepal—which was officially a Hindu state until 2007—have gained legal recognition for the first time.

In Nepal, known to tourists for its stunning natural landscapes, towering mountains, and gracious hospitality, Hindu and Buddhist traditions are deeply woven into the culture. Christian missions first reached the area in the 17th century, but 18th-century king Prithvi Narayan Shah, famous for his declaration that Nepal is a garden of 4 castes and 36 tribes, expelled the missionaries. Nepal would remain closed to all foreigners for nearly 200 years.

In the 1950s, following changes in foreign policy, Nepal began allowing international mission agencies to enter for social and charitable work. The government’s 1961 census counted 458 Christians in the country. By the 2001 census, there were over 100,000. The next two decades saw incredible growth, to 375,700 as of 2011 and 512,000 in 2021, or about 1.8 percent of Nepal’s nearly 30 million people.

Today, Christianity is a prominent faith in Nepal, with churches established in nearly every district, including about 300 congregations in the valley surrounding the capital of Kathmandu. However, activist groups seeking to restore the Hindu monarchy to power have pushed back against the growth of Christianity, sometimes even attacking churches.

Although Nepal’s 2015 constitution guaranteed religious freedom, it still left Nepal’s churches in a precarious legal situation because they had no way to register officially with the government. For years, they had operated under the guise of nongovernmental organizations or remained unregistered. But without formal recognition, the churches had no legal authorization to conduct religious activities. Even the congregations registered as nonprofit entities faced the constant threat of having their assets and properties confiscated during government scrutiny.

The National Civil Code of 2017 included provisions to permit various religious entities to register as Guthi, or religious trusts. However, churches faced persistent discrimination due to the dominance of Hindu extremists in government offices. Efforts to persuade government ministers to apply the 2017 provisions to churches were to no avail. On paper, the category of religious trust was open to all faiths; in practice, it was available only to Hindus.

This was the situation into which Karki, newly equipped with legal skills, entered after his release from prison in 2015.

Karki had already experienced one miraculous turnaround in his life. In 1989, abandoned by his family at age 10 and begging for money near a temple in Kathmandu, he was rescued by Joe Collins, a Baptist missionary operating a home for orphaned children in that city.

Collins and his family died in a plane crash in 1992, but the home continued to operate, and Karki grew up receiving Christian training.

By his teenage years, Karki recounted, he felt called to be an evangelist. He began traveling to remote villages of Nepal to share the gospel. In doing so, he observed the dire health care conditions in these villages, which led him to start health camps for rural residents. He then opened the small private hospital in Kathmandu that he managed until he was imprisoned. As with Joseph in the Book of Genesis, the injustice he experienced would prove to be a blessing in disguise.

After his release from prison, Karki rejoined his home church, House of Faith. Like most churches in Nepal, it was officially registered as a nonprofit since there was no process for legal registration of churches. But that year, without a clear explanation, the government denied House of Faith its annual renewal.

Relying on his newly developed legal knowledge, Karki began approaching various experts for help. All of them warned him that obtaining religious trust status for churches would be nearly impossible, as there were no established guidelines for such registrations.

For four years, Karki and two colleagues pursued registration, visiting ward offices and navigating the complex bureaucratic landscape. Their church’s file moved through various departments and ministries. Repeatedly, Karki was told that religious trust status was reserved exclusively for Hindus, to preserve their culture and heritage. One government official said he would rather cut off his own hand than issue a religious trust registration for a church. Karki regularly faced condescending and belittling remarks.

But Karki’s patience was ultimately rewarded. In 2019, by ministerial directive, a three-member committee was formed to draft guidelines for the registration of religious trusts. The guidelines were completed in 2020, and all district land-registration officers were instructed to accept applications. Later that year, House of Faith became the first church in Nepal to receive religious trust status.

During the celebration of this achievement, pastor Phurpu Bhote of Himali Fellowship Church declared that the names of Karki and his fellow advocates “should be recorded in the Christian history of Nepal.”

Karki himself reflected, “I have learned from the Bible that God often works through individuals who are deemed unworthy by society and the nation. This registration was not accomplished through my strength, wisdom, knowledge, skills, or any connections. It is the great grace of God and the answer to the prayers of saints and pastors.”

Now that the battle had been won once, the next step was to replicate the process. The organization SAF Nepal, which rehabilitates girls rescued from trafficking and produces gospel recordings in tribal languages, became the next applicant.

The Social Welfare Council (SWC), which oversees the activities of nonprofits in Nepal, had blocked SAF Nepal from receiving foreign funds due to opposition to its distribution of gospel recordings. The SWC then denied SAF Nepal’s request for renewal as a civic organization. At this point, SAF turned to Karki for help.

The process was just as arduous as in House of Faith’s case, requiring multiple visits to government offices and occasionally heated discussions with officials, but SAF Nepal ultimately succeeded in registering as a trust, enabling the organization to expand its work without fear of a shutdown.

As word of these successes spread and more churches and Christian organizations sought registration assistance, Karki recruited Nhuchhe Narayan Shrestha, who had drafted the incorporation letter for House of Faith, to help expedite the process. Shrestha is the founder of Chinari Legal Service, a Nepalese law firm that has handled over 4,800 legal cases.

Despite continued resistance at government offices staffed by Hindu employees, Karki and Shrestha have assisted numerous other churches and Christian ministries in pursuing registration. As guidance on how to register was disseminated nationwide, churches in rural areas also began achieving trust status, sometimes with fewer challenges than their counterparts in urban settings. As of this writing, 15 denominations representing about 1,000 local congregations have been approved, and many others have entered the process.

“We had prayed for years for a breakthrough like this,” said Ram Sharan Bhandari, pastor of Grace Church in Kathmandu. “For the first time, we can legally own land and conduct ministry work without fear of government interference.”

Pastor Rajan Malla of the Nehemiah Trust added, “The battles we faced in the past, with threats of losing our properties or being shut down, are no longer hanging over us. This is truly a new chapter for Christians in Nepal.”

Though many in Nepal’s government have remained reluctant to support recognition of Christians, two key officials have played crucial roles in creating a fairer regulatory environment. Devi Bahadur Bhandari, the chief land registration officer who registered Grace Church as a religious trust, commented, “I’ve worked in almost every government sector in Nepal and found that Christians, as a minority, contribute selflessly. We should support them, as they abide by the law and are not involved in crime.”

Similarly, Kamal Prasad Gautam, an administration officer and trust expert, said of Karki, “Thanks to one man’s efforts, the 2020 trust registration guidelines have paved the way for all Christians. We are grateful for this.”

Unfortunately, these successes have also unleashed some internal squabbles. Because of churches’ historically murky legal status, many of them had their properties registered under the names of individual believers. In some cases, when a church secured religious trust status, the landowners refused to transfer the property to the church, leading to sharp conflicts.

Most of these disputes have been resolved. But one prominent congregation, which had been praying for a path to legal recognition for two decades, has not yet taken advantage of the opportunity because of ongoing disagreements with the individuals who are the official owners of the church property.

Although Nepal’s constitution permits all religious groups to operate facilities, inequities remain. Priya Hari Bhandari, who worked with Shrestha and Karki on the original team of advocates for religious trust status, said, “Nepal’s constitution is still discriminatory. The definition of secularism in Nepal is flawed, as the state continues to protect Hinduism while denying basic rights to Christians.”

Despite these challenges, Karki remains “prayerfully hopeful” that with continued advocacy, Christians will ultimately secure full legal rights. On his current agenda are pursuing access to land for national cemeteries, tax-free land registration, and the establishment of a commission to safeguard the rights and privileges of Christians. Since the government allocates funds for the operation of Hindu temples, Karki hopes that it will eventually give proportional support to Christian churches.

The recognition of Nepali churches as religious trusts heralds a new era for Christianity in Nepal. Yet the legal battles are far from over, with both ongoing challenges from government authorities and internal church disputes threatening to undermine progress. The future of Christianity in Nepal is bright, but the sustained efforts of believers will be needed to bring full religious freedom for Christians and for all people in Nepal.

Surendra Bajracharya is a freelance writer and translator of Christian materials who lives in Kathmandu, Nepal.

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Ideas

The Holy Family and Mine

Nadya Williams

Contributor

Nativity scenes show us the loving parents we all need—and remind me that my own parents estranged me over my faith.

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

“So what are your holiday plans?”

I hear that a lot in polite conversations this time of year. And invariably, after I explain that we’ll visit my husband’s parents in another state, the follow-up question is whether we’ll visit my parents too. That’s when the conversation gets awkward.

I’ve had a full decade to master the art of demurring without much detail, but it’s still difficult to explain even a vague version of the truth—namely, that my parents will not receive me in their home because of my faith.

The story of my estrangement, to which I’ll return in a moment, is somewhat unusual. But estrangement itself is increasingly common. One recent study found that “as many as one in four people are estranged from at least one family member.”

After a decade, my estrangement leaves me numb rather than in full-fledged pain. But as I prepare to celebrate Christmas, it adds another dimension of longing for the promises that Christ’s birth holds out for us all. This is a season in which we speak often of reconciliation and decorate our homes and churches with images of a perfect family—the holy family, with a doting Mary and Joseph leaning over the baby in the manger, as if they don’t have a care in the world.

Our Nativity scenes may lean saccharine, but they tell an important truth about family. They depict a love and togetherness we all want and need. We all long for others to look at us as Jesus’ earthly parents looked at him, and the absence of that affection, the inability to reconcile (Rom. 12:18), is particularly hard at Christmas.

I was born in the Soviet Union, back when there was such a thing. In 1991, shortly before the collapse of the USSR, my secular Jewish family took advantage of temporarily opened borders and moved to Israel. Then, in 1996, when I was in high school, we moved to the United States.

It was supposed to be for only a year, but here I still am, almost 30 years later. I deferred military service in the Israeli army to attend college in the US, then deferred it again to go to graduate school. At some point, I received a polite letter informing me that the Israeli military forces would not need my (undoubtedly valuable) services after all and I was free to finish my PhD and pursue an academic career here. So I did.

A few years later, after a bizarre series of events in a year of compounding crises that upended my life and thought, I came to realize that the promises of Christianity were true. I started attending church. At Thanksgiving that fall, around the table with several families from church, I talked with a lifelong missionary about the theology of family. “Isn’t it remarkable,” I said, “that because of Christ, we’re all related?” He laughed with delight.

I was struggling then with my worthiness—or, more precisely, unworthiness. Was I ready to be baptized? He assured me that if I was asking that question, it was time. I was baptized a few weeks later, during the Wednesday night service the week before Christmas. My Thanksgiving conversationalist emailed me after hearing the news and wished me happy holidays celebrating with all my families, both the new one in Christ and the original one.

To be honest, I didn’t expect my secular Jewish mother and atheist Russian father to have any significant feelings about my conversion. Surely, I reasoned, for people who had spent their lives not thinking about God, it wouldn’t matter one way or another if their daughter now did.

I was wrong. “Don’t you know that it was Christians who killed Jews, including your relatives, in the Holocaust?” my mom queried in anger mixed with shock and dismay. She later mailed me a New Age book as an example of something more acceptable for me to explore, if I was so bent on finding some sort of supernatural presence in my life. After that, our conversations about faith ground to a halt.

The estrangement was not instantaneous. But by the time I married a fellow Christian three years later, it was complete. My parents refused to attend my wedding. And so, over the past decade, when I pick up the phone a couple of times a year and call the familiar number, it rings for a while and goes unanswered. Occasionally, my husband will email family photos, trying to keep the communication channels open—but to no avail.

I understand now Christ’s surprising statements on the loss of earthly family as one of the costs of discipleship, such as in Luke 14:26: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.”

I don’t hate my parents, nor was Christ calling for animosity. And yet it is a simple fact that my conversion was the reason for our estrangement. It sounds dramatic to say it came down to such a choice—parents or Christ—but it did. After so many years, it has dawned on me this fall that perhaps this estrangement will not end in this life.

But didn’t Jesus foresee this very possibility? It seems that he was expecting such scenarios to be the default rather than the exception—why else list all immediate family members among those one might have to lose to follow him?

The cost of discipleship for most of us in America doesn’t involve martyrdom of the sort Jesus’ earliest disciples faced. But estrangement is a very real cost too. This loneliness and division is not what God intended for family, and this is not what the fully redeemed world will be like. But it is the world we inhabit now.

Those questions about Christmastime plans remind me every year of that tension of already and not yet. For now, to follow Christ can mean severing bonds we never wished to sever. It can mean conflicts we never wanted, division from our closest kin. We long for a peace that we cannot create, a peace “the world cannot give” (John 14:27, NLT).

A few years ago, my husband and I took our children to a local live Nativity put on by another church. Sheep, goats, bunnies, llamas, and alpacas were joined by a very bored-looking angel, watching over Mary, Joseph, and the (plastic) sleeping babe.

At first glance, I wanted to laugh at the incongruous mix, which included animals that certainly were not in attendance at Jesus’ birth. But what a glorious promise we can see in this scene. God’s family makes no sense in earthly terms. But sometimes the alpacas remind us something the familiar witness of Bethlehem sheep cannot.

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

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Church Life

China’s Churches Go Deep Rather than Wide at Christmas

Eva Chou in Shanghai

In place of large evangelism outreaches, churches try to be more intentional in the face of religious restrictions and theological changes.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty, AP

Editor’s note: All the names in the article except for Ezra Pan have been changed, as house churches are unregistered in China and Christians can face reprisals for speaking to media.

During an Advent service last December, a family walked in front of the congregation to read a line of Scripture and light a candle on the Advent wreath, set on a table draped with purple cloth. As the candlelight flickered to life, the congregation responded with “Prepare the way of the Lord.”

It’s a scene playing out all over the world this time of year, yet this church was meeting not in a historic brick church in the US but in an office building in Shanghai.

For Robert Wang, observing Advent is a new Christmas tradition. In the past, his house church would hold large Christmas gatherings with around 60 first-time visitors in attendance. Because the Chinese government passed tighter religious regulations in 2018, the 150-member church has split into several smaller churches, one of which is pastored by Wang.

Today, Wang has changed how the congregation celebrates Christmas, not because of government restrictions but out of a desire to better integrate Christmas into the life of the church. Instead focusing on of one isolated event, he wants church members to walk through the Advent season and make evangelism part of their weekly rhythm.

“Through meditative reflection during Advent, learning Christmas hymns, prayer, and worship, the preparation for the season has become the most anticipated and exciting time of the year for our church,” Wang said.

The changes at Wang’s church are happening all over the country. Traditionally, churches in China would rent hotel conference rooms to host elaborate evangelism outreaches on Christmas, filled with choir singing, Nativity plays, testimonies, and gospel presentations. They aim to use the holiday as an opportunity to invite their non-Christian friends and introduce them to Jesus.

Some churches have moved away from this tradition due to tighter religious regulations that make it difficult to gather, fatigue in planning large events, failure in seeing new converts return to church, or changes in theology.

Yet amid the disillusionment, many pastors say they are rediscovering the beauty of the holiday through holding smaller Christmas celebrations, adopting traditions like Advent, and emphasizing the hope of the Incarnation. Those who continue holding large evangelistic events take care to focus on authentic relationships rather than the numbers.

“In the past, we viewed Christmas as merely an evangelistic outreach,” said Justin Xing, a minister in Shenyang who has also downsized his church’s gatherings. “Now we realize that Christmas is also an opportunity to equip believers to understand the gospel better.”

A turn toward liturgy

Wang, who became a Christian through college ministry, said that traditional Christmas events often felt obligatory, with little thought given to the message presented. Often, preparations were rushed, and the performances were not well rehearsed.

After becoming a pastor in 2018, Wang introduced his church to Advent material created by Redeemer City to City and encouraged congregational reading and group discussions. He also started teaching his congregation traditional Western Christmas hymns translated into Mandarin, like “Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus.” In 2022, he began the practice of lighting Advent candles.

Unlike evangelical Western churches that have returned to high liturgical practices to resonate with younger generations’ desire for sacredness, Wang said he seeks to incorporate these elements to help Chinese house churches cultivate a lasting Christian culture in a country where such traditions are scarce.

“Our focus is no longer solely on a Christmas party but on the message of Christ’s birth from multiple angles,” Wang said. He found that even as COVID-19 forced churches to stop meeting in person, the congregation could still go through Advent devotions together online.

Meanwhile, Daniel Han’s house church in Shanghai began observing Advent in 2020. The pastor said the congregation stopped holding large Christmas outreaches after he realized that the congregation relied on it as the church’s primary evangelistic activity.

He noted that for the early church, evangelism often happened through everyday interactions, citing Acts 5:42: “Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Messiah.”

Now, instead of focusing on one big Christmas event, the church views every Sunday service as an evangelism opportunity.

“From a pastoral perspective, we should focus on how to creatively and proactively engage in smaller-scale ministries that allow for personal evangelism and stronger interactions,” Han said.

Questioning Christmas’ pagan roots

At Rebecca Xiao’s house church in Linyi, Shandong province, Christmas was once a lively affair. In 2006, her church held a Christmas party at a community center for more than 400 attendees. Church leaders preached about Jesus’ birth, couples dressed in wedding attire and sang Christian songs to renew their vows, and new members shared their testimonies. But in 2014, church elders stopped their Christmas celebrations based on their new conviction that Christmas was a pagan holiday.

The elders had been influenced by Reformed Chinese leaders who pointed to accusations of paganism by Puritans in the 16th and 17th centuries that led to a ban on Christmas celebrations. Some elders went as far as deeming outreach efforts unnecessary due to their understanding of predestination.

Courtesy of Rebecca Xiao

A large Christmas service at Rebecca Xiao’s church in Shandong in 2006.

Xiao believes halting the celebrations overlooked the powerful ways God used those events. “The believers who went on stage all experienced dramatic transformations in their marriages and their family relationships because of their faith in Christ,” Xiao said. “The testimonies were especially powerful because everyone knows each other in this small community.”

Last year, Xiao’s church resumed its Christmas gatherings after those elders left, although they now hold the events in their church rather than renting out larger venues so they don’t attract government attention. Though fewer than 100 people attended, she felt joy in reconnecting with her community.

“Our previous approach may not have been wrong, but we unconsciously diluted the significance of Christ’s birth,” Xiao said. “Now, we are renewing our Christmas evangelism because Christmas is a time when people of all ages are willing to come to church.”

Continued Christmas celebrations

Even churches that continue to hold Christmas evangelism events have shifted the mission of their events over time. Ezra Pan, who pastors a house church in the suburbs of Hangzhou, first started seeing Christmas as a “window of opportunity for evangelism” in 1994 when he was 15.

At the time, he joined an evangelism team that trekked through the hills of rural Wenzhou, visiting different families to share the message of Jesus and help them with farm work. Every night, they would invite their new friends to evening Christmas services, where many decided to follow Jesus.

Today Pan continues to evangelize and unite the body of Christ during the Christmas season. For the past five years, his church has held Christmas parties that draw about 500 people.

Although the church faces constant government pressure and often needs to change the location of the event, they haven’t skipped a single year, even during the pandemic. To skirt notice, they typically hold the parties on the weekends around Christmas instead of on Christmas Eve and choose venues in the remote suburbs.

They bring friends who may never otherwise step inside a church and even invite them to participate in the program. Pan said that one year, the young man asked to play Jesus in a skit initially said that he didn’t believe his character was the Savior of the world. Yet after the performance, he became a Christian. Pan has also seen unbelieving spouses join the church after watching their children’s Christmas performances.

“Christmas has become an integral part of our pastoral care and evangelism; it is no longer an isolated event,” Pan said, pointing to the opportunities it provides for his church members to serve together and invite others to join their church body.

Christmas canceled

During the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, the Chinese government banned religion, and Christmas became a museum artifact, Pan said. Yet even then, Chinese Christians kept meeting and celebrating Christmas, at times in caves, in cemeteries, or privately in homes with their windows drawn and doors shut.

Some churches, like Lydia Xu’s house church in Chengdu, are experiencing a return of this type of “gray Christmas.”

Since her church joined Early Rain Covenant Church and pastor Wang Yi in creating the Western China Presbytery in 2013, it has become more difficult for Xu’s church to rent venues for Christmas celebrations. As Wang’s influence grew and his outspokenness drew the ire of the government, local officials began to more closely monitor all the churches in the presbytery.

So Xu’s church started to hold Christmas activities only at their own building and stopped inviting as many nonbelievers. When authorities shut down Early Rain and threw Wang in prison in 2018, her church stopped Christmas celebrations altogether.

Today, Sunday services in December are no different from the rest of the year. Xu is disappointed that they can’t witness on Christmas anymore but says the church now thinks more intentionally about evangelizing regularly.

“The message of Christianity doesn’t have to necessarily be delivered through Christmas,” Xu said. “We use weddings and funerals to show that Christians have a different understanding of life and death.”

Government-sanctioned Three-Self churches face even tighter restrictions, as authorities banned Christmas celebrations in 2019 and do not allow anyone under 18 to attend church.

Yet for Luke Zhu, who serves at a Three-Self church in Anhui province, Christmas has held a deeper meaning since the restrictions went into effect. “Christmas is not merely about celebrating Jesus’ birth; it reminds us that Christ came into a dark world, bringing hope and light,” he said. “Jesus’ humble birth in a stable reflects God’s will to bring comfort and redemption amid worldly challenges.”

Local believers have learned to navigate these restrictions by discreetly organizing Christmas activities for children and teaching them the significance of the holiday.

Although Zhu misses the freedom of inviting friends to Christmas gatherings during his early days of faith, he noted that “since Christ was born amidst crisis and persecution, the worldly powers will always oppose the true King. Regardless of external circumstances, Christ’s life has brought salvation, and God’s kingdom will endure and ultimately triumph over all secular authorities.”

- More from Eva Chou

Theology

Why Christians Oppose Euthanasia

Brad East

Contributor

The immorality of killing the old and ill has never been in question for Christians. Nor is our duty to care for those the world devalues.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

Advent is a time for the church to prepare to celebrate the gift of new life: Jesus, God made flesh, born of a virgin, laid in a manger. In a gruesome twist of timing, however, this Advent season has begun with euthanasia once more in the news.

At the end of November, British lawmakers approved the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill to move forward, albeit by a relatively slim margin: 330 in favor, 275 against. Australia and some US states already have similar laws in place, while Canada’s MAID program (Medical Assistance in Dying) has become the country’s fifth leading cause of death. In Canada, as in the Netherlands, those who seek, select, or acquiesce to “assisted dying” need not be old, nor their illness terminal. Even young people with mental maladies have been killed this way.

These programs raise moral, theological, and political questions for believers, but many of them are quite easily answered: Christians oppose euthanasia.

The church’s moral teaching has always held that murder—defined as the intentional taking of innocent life—is intrinsically evil. It follows that actively intending the death of an elderly or sick human being and then deliberately bringing about that death through some positive action, such as the administration of drugs, is always and everywhere morally wrong.

This ethical argument is very similar to the one Christians make about abortion. We could modify the oft-quoted line from Dr. Seuss—“A person’s a person no matter how small”—by substituting old or ill for “small.” (Other substitutions also suggest themselves: smart, abled, sexed, or hued.) To be sure, there are relevant differences between active euthanasia and, for example, removing a brain-dead person from life support. There are none, however, between administering fatal drugs and offering or prescribing them: Both directly facilitate the intended death of a patient under a doctor’s medical care.

Christians are not alone in valuing life; many Jews, Muslims, and other people of goodwill also affirm the intrinsic goodness of human life. But there is a distinctly Christian conviction at work here, and it is bedrock to our faith: Every human being, from conception to death, is created by God, loved by him, and stands under his protection.

The claim that innocent human life is inviolable is not primarily a claim about us humans, then, but about our Creator. To murder (or torture or enslave, as the church father Gregory of Nyssa saw as early as the fourth century) is to trespass without authority, to assert rights where one has none. It is to unsay God’s “very good” spoken over a fellow creature, to reject and despise a man or woman whom the Lord has brought into being and for whom Christ died. Inviolability is the upshot of our creation in the divine image.

Unlike many topics in theology and ethics, this is not an issue on which the church has ever been ambiguous. There were no early church councils to debate the taking of innocent life. It didn’t take centuries of conflict to adjudicate. On the contrary, Christians were known from the start for their adamant rejection of pagan disrespect for those unwanted by their families or deemed socially useless—the unborn and newborn, disabled and elderly.

Neighbors noticed immediately: In refusing to classify any human being as worthless, Christians were strange. They didn’t expose their baby girls. They cared for the orphan and the widow. And they applied this principle across the board, not only to others but also to themselves, which meant rejecting suicide, too, as a kind of murder.

Which brings us back to euthanasia, where the dominant story in countries like Canada is not forcible killing but death at the patient’s own request. Our culture’s instinct is to say that this kind of suicide is not the same as murder, that “death with dignity” is the right of the autonomous self. While understandable, this instinct is wrong.

My life is no more my own to take than is the life of another. True—in any number of ways, my life is “mine.” But in one crucial sense—the most important sense—it does not belong to me. As the Heidelberg Catechism puts it, I am not my own, but belong, body and soul, to the Lord who loved me and gave himself for me (Gal. 2:20). In Paul’s words, I was bought with a price (1 Cor. 6:20), and I cannot repay it except with thanks, obedience, and reciprocated love.

For Christians, therefore, autonomy as our culture understands it is not a relevant variable in the moral equation of euthanasia. This remains true even when the life in question is painful or likely to be brief. We simply lack the authority to put anyone, including ourselves, “out of their misery”—a phrase we reserve for animals for a reason. This authority belongs to God alone. There are legal, cultural, and political reasons to resist the logic of euthanasia, but above all, Christians are called to persevere in hardship by uniting our suffering to the passion of Christ, who bore our sins on the tree, thereby leaving us an example, that we might follow in his steps (1 Pet. 2:21, 24).

In Christ and in the lives of all the poor and hurting to whom he ministered, we see that every human life, no matter its relative health or condition, is precious to the Lord. We honor his love by honoring all lives, precisely in their suffering.

To be sure, Christians want to ameliorate suffering. But if we know anything, we know that no policy, no discovery, no technology can conquer death. As theologian Stanley Hauerwas likes to say, there is no getting out of life alive. Choosing the hour and means of our death is one particularly seductive counterfeit defeat of death. But Christ alone is the victor over that “last enemy” (1 Cor. 15:26).

If, however, the ethical question of euthanasia is clear within the church, it becomes more complicated when we turn to law and public policy. Christian votes and advocacy can influence laws governing medical practice, but we also live in a pluralistic, secular society in which our beliefs and practices are not the only or even the most dominant influence. Though our ethics may not prove persuasive to those who don’t share our faith, we should nevertheless fight to keep euthanasia from being legally permitted or socially approved. Why?

The two—laws and norms—are related. Even with “right-to-die” laws passing across the Western world, few would defend them through bald appeal to the valuelessness of incapacitated or aging lives. No one wants to say out loud that old or very sick people should get on with it and just die already. But that is the message of these laws.

Besides the outrage of tasking doctors with violating the Hippocratic oath—or, what’s worse, the Orwellian twist that describes killing patients as “helping” them by relieving their pain—the social implications are undeniable. If I am unwell and a doctor presents me with three options, one of which is my own termination, suddenly suicide becomes a real option in a way it probably wasn’t before.

This is one reason we as Christians are right to stand up for the vulnerable even if we fail to persuade the majority. That task will continue whether or not such laws pass where we live. The church rejects the Scandinavian vision of a world “cured” of children with Down syndrome. We equally reject a world “freed” of the aged, the hurting, or the lonely. We want these people to live.

We owe no one an apology for saying so, but we do owe those the world devalues our sustained, costly care. With medicalized suicide on the table, the vulnerable are bound to wonder, Would the world be better off without me? Am I a burden to my family, or perhaps to society? Would my sacrifice benefit a welfare system already stretched to the brink? After all, some victims of MAID have reportedly “chosen” it because they lacked the funds for housing or adequate treatment. (Christian approaches to medicine, insurance, and markets are relevant here. Let the reader understand.)

In a word, we serve the world best when we not only model lives that accept the fact of death—though not its finality—but also encourage others to live to the full until their time runs out. We do this via norms and laws, but above all we do it by serving and loving the hurting and vulnerable, by showing them, through word and deed, that their lives have value and are worth living to the end. A person’s a person no matter how old, no matter how ill, no matter how pained.

And if such persons are burdens, we must bear them and bear with them (Gal. 6:2, Eph. 4:2). As Christian ethicist Gilbert Meilaender put it in the title of a 2010 essay, “I want to burden my loves ones.”

The truth is, we are burdens, from the moment we are born. There’s no getting around it. There is no burden-free life. To seek to engineer one is to rid the world of people who burden. It isn’t ending suffering so much as ending people who suffer.

That’s not kind or beautiful, dignified or selfless. At Christmastime it’s aptly labeled Scroogian. It was, you’ll recall, that “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner” Ebenezer Scrooge who, regarding the needy in London who’d rather die than go to the poorhouse, said: “If they would rather die … they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

Humbug! The church knows better. The yoke of Christ’s law bids us to invite the world’s burdens into our midst and there find life, joy, and solidarity. To quote Hauerwas again, “in a hundred years, if Christians are identified as people who do not kill their children or the elderly, we will have done well.”

The onus here isn’t on those who die by legalized euthanasia. Even if they request this kind of death, they are victims of a system. The problem is a regime, downstream from an entire cultural complex. In other words, the onus for change is on the rest of us. The church must, by the Spirit’s power, be a community of care for the sick, the depressed, the lonely, the elderly. Laws are but a stopgap. What we need is a culture of life to confound the culture of death. We say yes to life tomorrow by saying no to death today.

Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint.

- More from Brad East

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A turn toward liturgy

Questioning Christmas’ pagan roots

Continued Christmas celebrations

Christmas canceled

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