Author: Chris Boyd

“A real man…evaluates his relationships based on how well he keeps his promises and commitments within those relationships.”

Ed: In your new book you write that, “Satan has been attacking gender, gender roles, and especially masculinity with a vengeance over the last few years, and even Christians have been deceived.” Where exactly have Christian men been deceived?

Ken: Satan has been playing the long game on separating Christians from the love and unity we have in Christ. God says in Genesis 1-3 that male and female are the image of God, meaning that a fully masculine man and fully feminine woman coming together as “one flesh” in marriage is the best image of God that we have in this broken world. By attacking our understanding of what a man is, Satan is re-writing our understanding of who God is.

We must understand that God defines what a man is, not society. Men are called to stand up for justice, care for the poor and oppressed, and be jealous for God’s name. This is why I often say that humility is the mark of a person who is in love with Jesus and the outward expression of humility in a man is courage and generosity.

Courage, because when you don’t see yourself as any more important than anyone else, you will always stand up for the truth and for others. Generosity, because a humble heart gives possessions, time, and spirit with abandon because humility trusts in God to fill our cup back up to overflowing.

Ed: We live in a culture that attacks the very idea of masculinity, that wants men to be silent and soft. How are men supposed to act today—especially Christian men? What does it mean to be a “true man?”

Ken: A man is one of action, not reaction. He understands that he is accountable for solving problems and making the world a better place for everyone in his charge. He is constantly looking …

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It’s not about manufacturing positive religious feelings.

The absolute best worship service I have ever been to was in an Orthodox church in downtown Chicago. It was full of evangelical converts to Orthodoxy, and so it had the rich, historic liturgy and singing combined with evangelical fervor. I dare say I felt lifted into the presence of God, or better, that the presence of God had descended on us.

The absolute worst worship service I have ever attended was an Orthodox church in Philadelphia. The priests led the liturgy from behind the iconostasis—a screen of icons separating the sanctuary (where the altar sits) from the nave (where the congregation sits). The only response we in the congregation were called to make was the occasional “Amen.” We didn’t even join the priests in singing as I recall. My Protestant sensibilities were so offended, I walked out in the middle of the service.

I relate this experience to say that even though I believe that in general Orthodoxy exalts and glorifies God like no other Christian tradition, it is far from perfect. It also shows that even a tradition that has all the right “tools” for adoration can stumble.

For those following this series, last week I concluded the four-part series that argued for a new way of thinking about the essence and ultimate purpose of the church. For the next few weeks, I want to explore what this might look like in the pew and pulpit. I’ll examine the ways in which we succumb all too often to the horizontal and suggest some ways, upward. I’ll look at the dynamics of preaching, Bible reading, and the sacraments/ordinance, in particular. Let me start, though, with the dynamics of evangelical worship, which has its own highs and lows.

It’s All About Worship

Our understandable …

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Jen Pollock Michel traces the paradoxical shape of Christian truth.

One Sunday not long ago, I was leading children’s worship in our church. During the weekly prayer time, we sat in a circle with the kids taking turns holding a cross that designates their moment to pray, either silently or out loud. I couldn’t help but smile at the “prayer face” some kids made when their turn arrived. Upon receiving the cross, they would scrunch up their closed eyes and assume a very serious demeanor. This was the posture they thought God wanted to see.

Watching them reminded me of Jen Pollock Michel’s words in Surprised by Paradox: The Promise of “And” in an Either-Or World: “There is a great deal of polite praying in church. I am guilty of it myself. We are pious and solicitous with God. . . . Prayer seems to be a lot of saying what we think God wants to hear.”

As Michel observes, God wants to hear not our polite prayers but our rawest expressions of grief, complaint, and hurt. This is one of the surprising paradoxes her book invites us to explore—that prayers of lament can function as confessions of faith. While they may seem impolite and impious, they still involve faith. “Maybe mustard seed faith, maybe angry faith,” she writes, but a form of faith nonetheless.

These kinds of prayers are deeply biblical. Indeed, Michel points out that Scripture contains more psalms of lament than psalms of thanksgiving and praise. Even Christ himself, nailed to the cross, prays the words of Psalm 22:1: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” As Michel puts it, “God did not simply author the songs of lament: he sang them.”

It is clear that Michel’s words on lament carry a deep familiarity with grief, suffering, and the …

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Max Lucado and five other leaders share their petitions: “Let’s pray. Let’s lament. Let’s groan.”

As CT’s immigrant communities editor, I was planning our coverage of the crises affecting immigrant children at the Texas border when I saw the now-infamous Associated Press photo: that little arm around the neck of her father, hanging on as they drowned in the Rio Grande.

Days of pent-up journalistic angst cracked, and I sobbed. I cried thinking of the fear of those last moments. I cried in dismay knowing that, if they had made it, they might have been safe. I cried in frustration knowing that, if they had made it, they might not have been safe.

She could have been one of the diaper-less toddlers in a detention center. One of the 700 separated from her parents in the last year. One of 125 to be left behind after the parents were deported. She could have been one of the 1,000 or more children abused while in US shelters. Meanwhile, authorities continue to discover unidentified border-crossers dead in the South Texas desert—most recently, a young woman, toddler, and two infants found in Mission, Texas.

As I continue to report on Christians at the border—the humanitarian work ministries are doing there as well as efforts to lobby Congress for a better system—I realized we must begin with lament over the hopelessness and danger these image-bearers face.

Lament is a cry for mercy or help in a time of sadness and regret. Because we are uncomfortable in lament, we often look away in times of overwhelming tragedy. We don’t want to feel grief over the deaths of migrant children: Carlos Gergorio Hernández Vásquez, 16; Juan de León Gutiérrez, 16; Darlyn Cristabel Cordova-Valle, 10; Felipe Alónzo-Gomez 8; Jakelin Call Maquin, 7; and Wilmer Josué Ramírez Vásquez, …

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My reflections after eight years of silence.

When one of the world’s top Greek scholars at a top university spread “first and second century” New Testament manuscripts on top of his office pool table, my colleague and I about fainted.

Surrounded by classical busts, Egyptian funerary masks, and a pile of medieval binder fragments, we stood mesmerized in the office of Dirk Obbink at Christ Church, Oxford. The “First-Century Mark” saga began. It’s still playing out.

Over the last eight years, we learned that much was not as it seemed. There seemed to be a manuscript fragment of a gospel dating to the first decades of the church. Not quite. The manuscript seemed to be for sale. It wasn’t, really. Now the world knows there were four early gospel fragments “for sale,” and at the helm was an esteemed professor, transitioning these days into a sort of Sir Leigh Teabing of Da Vinci Code lore.

Like the Harry Potter “moving staircase” at Hogwarts, filmed across in the Bodley Tower viewable from Obbink’s window, what was to unfold over the next several years would seem illusory for outside scholars and became sensationalized in the press. The sudden appearance of these manuscripts was dizzying even for the experts and owners, temporary and otherwise.

Scott Carroll and I, the two founding scholars for the Museum of the Bible, were there—we thought—for another research discussion. These were always enjoyable though long visits. As we were about to leave Obbink’s office, he stood and said, “I have something you two might like to see.” He pulled out a manila filing envelope and opened Pandora’s Box. He showed us four papyrus pieces of New Testament Gospels identified as Matthew …

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Evangelicals in favor of traditional marriage debate the place of LGBT identity in the church.

Faced with more proposals addressing LGBT issues than any other topic, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) last night approved measures to affirm the Nashville Statement and launch its own study committee on sexuality.

The voting extended past midnight as pastors debated how their denomination could best clarify its positions, provide clergy helpful resources, and offer pastoral care for those raising questions around LGBT issues and same-sex attraction.

The decisions at this year’s PCA general assembly in Dallas follow months of controversy surrounding Presbyterian leaders’ involvement in Revoice, a conference featuring the voices of same-sex attracted Christians who affirm traditional beliefs around marriage and sexuality. The inaugural conference was hosted at a PCA church in St. Louis last July. Its second gathering was held earlier this month at another venue.

The Nashville Statement, a 14-point document released by the complementarian Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood in 2017, conflicts in part with Revoice’s approach, particularly article 7, which denies that “adopting a homosexual or transgender self-conception is consistent with God’s holy purposes in creation and redemption.” Some participants continue to self-identify as gay or same-sex attracted.

“Most of the Christians I know who describe themselves as ‘gay’ use the word in a similar way that Paul did when he called himself a sinner. They use the word not as a banner or as an identity, but as an honest recognition of their broken state as those affected by original sin,” wrote Christ Presbyterian pastor Scott Sauls, in a 4,700-word blog post urging his denomination against “unnecessary …

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The ideas of human dignity and respect for all didn’t develop in a vacuum.

The Bible begins with the story of creation. God speaks the universe into existence. Within that story is the account of the creation of humankind. According to the Bible, above and beyond everything else God made, humans are special, his crowning achievement! The Book of Genesis records the moment when God decided to create human beings: “Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:26–27).

According to the Bible, humans are different because, unlike all the other creatures on the planet, we are created in God’s image. Everyone bears what Christian teaching calls the imago Dei—Latin for “image of God”—and therefore are often referred to as image bearers. For this reason, humans have worth; they have value over and above anything else in creation. When this notion is applied to ethics and human rights, it is revolutionary.

We are all made in the image of God. This is what makes our worth and our dignity inherent and inseparable from who we are, whether governments recognize human rights or not. We do not have rights because we deserve them; we do not have rights because we have earned them; we do not have rights because we are white or black, male or female, American or Chinese. We have rights because each of us is made in the image of God and therefore has inherent worth and dignity.

Yet this truth hasn’t always been self-evident or widely believed. …

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Falsified resurrection stories should not cause us to discount credible miracle accounts.

Around 1960, in the Republic of Congo, a two-year-old girl named Thérèse was bitten by a snake. She cried out for help, but by the time her mother, Antoinette, reached her, Thérèse was unresponsive and seemed to have stopped breathing. No medical help was available to them in their village, so Antoinette strapped little Thérèse to her back and ran to a neighboring village.

According to the US National Library of Medicine, brain cells start dying less than five minutes after their oxygen supply is removed, an event called hypoxia. After six minutes, lack of oxygen can cause severe brain damage or death. Antoinette estimates that, given the distance and the terrain, it probably took about three hours to reach the next village. By the time they arrived, her daughter was likely either dead or had sustained significant brain damage.

Antoinette immediately sought out a family friend, Coco Ngoma Moyise, who was an evangelist in the neighboring village. They prayed over the lifeless girl and immediately she started breathing again. By the next day, she was fine—no long-term harm and no brain damage. Today, Thérèse has a master’s degree and is a pastor in Congo.

When I heard this story, as a Westerner I was naturally tempted toward skepticism, but it was hard to deny. Thérèse is my sister-in-law and Antoinette was my mother-in-law.

By contrast, in February, a video of South African preacher Alph Lukau drew widespread attention for what appeared to be someone raised from the dead in his church. Lukau claims he simply prayed for the unconscious man in the coffin, but regardless of who is responsible, the situation was clearly designed to deceive. The coffin …

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Our missional activism threatens to kill us. It doesn’t have to.

In my last few essays (here, here, and here) I’ve been arguing that American Christianity, and evangelical Christianity particularly, thinks about the church in mostly instrumental ways. The church’s core identity is summed up in what it’s called to do, in most cases, one form of mission activity or another. Without denying the urgency to love our neighbors, I’ve been saying that our horizontal concerns for the neighbor have all but eclipsed our passion for God. It’s like we have an advanced case of Alzheimer’s: We don’t know who we are or what we’re supposed to be about, but we feel driven to get up and walk wherever our legs will take us.

I’ve tried to show from Scripture that the church is first and foremost—and at its essence and for eternity—about the vertical, brothers and sisters embedded deeply in Christ, glorifying God and enjoying him forever. This is not just what we do but who we are.

All this to me is not a theological construct, a creative way to think about the relationship of the church to the world. Based on my experience as a pastor and member of the mainline, and my three decades as a journalist embedded in American evangelicalism, I think this view of the church is crucial for the very health and survival of American Christianity. This is what I will argue in this essay.

From Excitement to Despair

Here is what I’ve seen happen time and again when the church is conceived primarily as being missional, existing for the sake of the world:

First, it energizes many Christians—let’s acknowledge that. This was one motive of Rauchenbusch as he articulated the social gospel—he wanted to church to get out of the pews and into the …

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It’s a serious problem among evangelicals. But fixating on it might be missing the bigger picture.

Porn appears to be overrunning Christian cultures. Some have quietly capitulated. Evangelicalism, however, has not. But conservative Christians are no longer on the offensive against “obscenity,” as they were in the 1970s and ’80s. Today, they’re in survival mode. That’s one lesson we learn from Addicted to Lust: Pornography in the Lives of Conservative Protestants, a new book from University of Oklahoma sociologist Samuel Perry.

Evangelicals have a dilemma on their hands. For good reason, Perry surmises, “there can be no truce with pornography.” But the battlefield’s casualty list is fast mounting, even while the enemy’s weaponry is becoming more powerful and sophisticated. What to do? Surrender? Desert? And what of the walking wounded—leave them to the enemy? The language of war pervades evangelical discussions of pornography because resisting its siren call is hard.

Addicted to Lust is about as close to a page-turner as you’ll get with a scholarly book. Perry gets the players and the tensions right. He’s fair. He knows the science can be biased because it’s conducted by scientists—humans—who often have a stake in the answers to their questions. While he seeks to avoid rooting for one side—a noble effort to remain an impartial observer—he nevertheless acknowledges that porn has not made the world “a more humane and equitable place.”

Perry and I agree that we have overestimated addiction to pornography. Genuine addiction interrupts daily life. It’s hard to make the case that a habit hidden for years applies here. When dad’s an alcoholic, on the other hand, everyone in the family knows it. Elsewhere …

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