Author: Chris Boyd

Growing old is not what it used to be. For millions of retirees, that may actually be good news.

Pat Poole felt a mix of relief and uncertainty once he decided to retire from his sales management job at Halliburton at the end of March. An Oklahoma Sooners football fan and an avid golfer, Poole looked forward to more leisure time after leaving the Houston-based global oil service company. But he also had questions. One morning, he put down the TV remote and asked his wife with complete sincerity, “What am I going to do?”

The world is undergoing a massive demographic shift. More than 70 million baby boomers will retire in the next 20 years in the United States alone. By 2035, Americans of retirement age will exceed the number of people under age 18 for the first time in US history. Globally, the number of people age 60 and over is projected to double to more than 2 billion by 2050.

But as retirement looms for baby boomers, a growing number of them—both Christians and their neighbors—are discontented with current cultural assumptions about it. They’re asking new questions about money, work, time, family, leisure, and a life of purpose.

As Americans live longer, “we do not know what we will be doing with all that time,” Joseph Coughlin, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AgeLab, told the National Journal. Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott, authors of 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity, point out that people are living longer than ever before, and the average retiree can expect to live another 20–30 years.

What retirees consistently say they want to do with their time in retirement is spend it with family. But what happens when the realities of caring for needy adult children, looking after aging parents, and spending newfound hours …

Continue reading…

Experts analyze the impact on persecuted believers after the two polemic leaders walk away without a deal.

On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump referred to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un as “his friend.”

At extreme odds a year ago, the two leaders met this week in Hanoi, Vietnam, with a new agreement possibly on the table. This time, Trump made friendly overtures to Kim—even going so far as to say he believed the leader had not been directly responsible for the death of an American student. But when the summit ended on Thursday, Trump walked away after the US refused to agree to North Korea’s demand that all sanctions be lifted off the country.

For years, North Korea has been one of the world’s worst countries to be a Christian; Open Doors has ranked it No. 1 for nearly the past two decades. Dozens of volunteers and employees from the many Christian nonprofits that serve North Koreans—believers and unbelievers alike—have had increasing difficulty serving the beleaguered population.

CT asked six experts from the Lausanne Movement’s North Korea Committee, which held consultations before and after the first Trump-Kim summit in Singapore, to weigh in. Did Trump and Kim’s summit help North Korean Christians? Their answers appear below, arranged from no to yes.

Ben Torrey, director, the Fourth River Project:

My hope is that, as a result of the Hanoi Summit, the existing regional travel restriction that is preventing US citizens from traveling to the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] will be lifted allowing Christian NGOs and humanitarian workers to enter the country. These workers are doing a great deal to help the ordinary people of the DPRK in the name of Jesus Christ. The US-imposed travel restriction interferes seriously with that mission.

I do not think the summit …

Continue reading…

We are getting back into the groove of posting some good church signs.

More Church Signs!

We are getting back into the groove of posting some good church signs. They never seem to end, and I think we all enjoy seeing them. So tweet me some good ones at @edstetzer and we will get them posted. In the meantime, enjoy the ones below.

Two signs for the price of one, anyone?

Thanks, Reformed Manbeard.

God utilizing cultural elements to reach our world for Jesus? Yes!

Thanks again, Reformed Manbeard.

Here’s an attention-grabber, though not necessarily a good one!

Thanks, John McCollum.

Again with the cultural tie-ins! Let’s remember to not take this too far, though, people.

Thanks, Gabe Bernal.

Continue reading…

N. T. Wright suggests Jesus would disagree with the British government. Christian scholars in UK, US, and Middle East weigh in.

N. T. Wright, the esteemed theologian and former Anglican bishop, recently offered brief reflections on the case of Shamima Begum—the British teen now seeking to return home after joining ISIS in 2015—in a letter to the editor of The Times of London.

He wrote that “as a tax payer” he couldn’t fault a previous writer who warned against letting Begum come back, but “as a Christian I cannot help reflecting that if Jesus had thought like that he would never have told the parable of the Prodigal Son, which neatly marks out his teaching both from Islam and from the cold logic of secularism.”

Like Begum, American Hoda Muthana also left her home in Alabama to become an ISIS bride. Both face major government resistance as they seek to leave Syria, with the UK revoking Begum’s citizenship and the US refusing to admit Muthana, saying she never was entitled to citizenship in the first place.

CT asked scholars from the UK, US, and the Middle East: Does Jesus’ memorable parable of forgiveness inform how we treat prodigal daughters who once signed up for a jihadist group? Their answers appear below, arranged from yes to no.

Gary M. Burge, visiting professor of New Testament at Calvin Theological Seminary:

There is no doubt that two reflexes are in order when a country considers repatriating a young woman such as Begum who joined ISIS in Syria. A citizenry needs to be aware of the character of Begum’s involvement and consider if she presents a danger. But certainly, a quick-reflex rejection of her return is impulsive and reactive. We also have to wonder if there is an anti-Islamic attitude here. One might wonder if an Irish-American had once joined the IRA in the 1980s, would we have …

Continue reading…

Gen Z’s digital natives bring followers along for the experience.

“I think what I learned can be summed up like this: I can either live missionally, or live for nothing,” read an Instagram caption posted by Max Park, one of 7,000 young adults who attended the Cross Conference in Louisville, Kentucky, at the start of the year.

That week, another 40,000 showed up for Passion in Atlanta, Dallas, and Washington, DC, and more than 10,000 for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s Urbana in St. Louis.

For decades, Christian college students have gathered en masse to praise, pray, and hear the Word preached at national conferences like these, then returned to their campuses reenergized about the gospel and ready to share what they’ve learned.

But in the age of social media, their testimonies don’t wait until they’ve left the stadiums; attendees like Park take their followers along. They process the event through snapshots and social media posts, proclaiming the Good News to their friends in real time.

“These past four days have been incredibly eye-opening and overwhelmingly convicting. … It breaks my heart to see how I have failed to truly live for Christ the way he has called me to,” Rachel Carroll wrote in January, beneath a picture of her smiling with a pack of friends outside Passion’s Dallas event, her third year attending.

This year marks a shift in student ministry from the last of the millennial generation to Generation Z, which the Pew Research Center defines as those born after 1996, a cutoff based largely on technology. Millennials came of age as internet connectivity spread; Gen Z never knew life without it.

At Passion, Louie Giglio declared the advent of the iPhone as one of the most formative things in their lives.

“The phone …

Continue reading…

Science seeks to fix aging and death. But a Christian vision of the good life might actually embrace them.

A preacher’s kid growing up in the Bible Belt, Micah Redding had a particular view of the physical world and God’s work in it. Singing popular hymns like “This World is Not My Home” and “I’ll Fly Away,” he took away this message: It’s all going to burn anyway, so why bother with the environment or curing diseases? That’s a distraction from the gospel. Our bodies don’t go to heaven, just our souls.

When he started studying the Bible for himself and reading authors like N. T. Wright and C. S. Lewis, Redding formed a theology that more closely embraces the material world. “If we believe the material world is good, we have to engage in the transformation of it,” he said. He sees science and technology as part of God’s vision for the world, which, for him, includes radical life extension.

Redding points to Isaiah 65, where “one who dies at a hundred years will be thought a mere child,” as well as the extremely long-lived Genesis patriarchs. “Scripture really places this value on human life, relationality, and productivity,” he said. “We have to appreciate that idea as part of our embrace of the material life.”

In 2013, Redding founded the Christian Transhumanist Association (CTA), a group bringing faith and ethics into transhumanist conversations. Transhumanists, who believe that human capacities can be enhanced by science and technology, hold a gamut of views. Some are anti-aging researchers applying biomedicine to improve humanity. Aubrey de Grey, for instance, who headlined a recent CTA conference, studies preventative maintenance for the human body and believes the first human to live to 1,000 has already been born. …

Continue reading…

But early Christian yonic art symbolized baptism, not free sex.

In case you haven’t heard, Nadia Bolz-Weber recently commissioned a statue of a vagina. She gifted the statue to Gloria Steinem, who I hope put it on her mantle (though in a pinch, it could also double as a paperweight or spoon rest). The sculpture exists in part to promote Bolz-Weber’s new book, Shameless, and in part as a kind of performance art protest against the damage done by “purity culture.” She invited women to mail in their purity rings—in exchange for a “certificate of impurity”—and then melted them down to form the statue.

Bolz-Weber’s statue has been applauded by some as an artistic celebration of female sexual liberation. Her critics, by contrast, bring up the authority of the Bible, the Christian call to repentance, and the need to distinguish destructive parts of “purity culture” from basic Christian sexual ethics like chastity and marital fidelity. Others take issue with the icon itself as a fertility idol (or at least a sex idol, since I’m assuming this statue is on the pill). A few less-helpful critics responded essentially, “Eww. Vagina art! Icky!”

However, long before Bolz-Weber’s book tour and the ensuing debate, Christians have been making yonic art. (Yonic, by the way, means vagina-shaped, or technically vulva-shaped. It’s the feminine counterpart to phallic.)
You want vaginal imagery? The church has you covered. Some early baptismal fonts (starting in about the 4th century) were quite intentionally yonic. The Baptistery of Jucundus in Subetula, Tunisia and Vitalis’ Baptistery (also in Tunisia) are two that look particularly vaginal, but there are a handful of others that art historians and theologians …

Continue reading…

What we learn about Bible figures from the clothing they put on, take off, and tear apart.

Storytellers know that the unfolding of dramatic events can be hard to follow. So to help their audiences make sense of what is happening, they often insert symbolic clues. In cartoons, the villains scowl and speak with gravelly voices, and the heroes smile and sound all-American. In movies, a menacing bassline announces the arrival of a dangerous person, while comic figures appear with bouncier melodies.

In the story of Samuel, Saul, Jonathan, and David, you can guess what will happen by looking at their clothes.

Some of this works at a simple level. When we first meet Goliath, he is covered from head to foot in scaly armor, which makes him look like a serpent or even a dragon. So when we find the snake-like accuser lying dead, his head crushed by the anointed king, we are not especially surprised. We first meet Samuel as “a boy wearing a linen ephod” (1 Sam. 2:18). Straightaway, we know he will function a bit like a priest.

Right after this, we hear that “each year his mother made him a little robe” (2:19). This garment will represent Samuel’s prophetic authority throughout the book. When Saul rips Samuel’s robe, he accidentally foreshadows that his kingdom will be “torn” away from him and given to David (15:27–28).

Saul, likewise, has a robe that symbolizes royal authority (or lack thereof). In one of the story’s dramatic moments, David refuses to kill Saul while he is going to the bathroom, instead cutting off a corner of his robe (24:4–5). At face value this is an act of kindness, as David spares the man trying to kill him. But as readers, we know there is more going on. Saul’s kingdom will indeed be “cut off” and given to David, and it …

Continue reading…

“Only when we “go vertical” and connect in a relationship with God through Jesus will we find the true joy that we are looking for.”

Ed: On your 10-year wedding anniversary, you two felt very differently about your marriage. Dave, you thought your relationship couldn’t get any better, and Ann, you were hanging on for dear life and told Dave you had lost your feelings for him. Can you share a little bit about that night and how it changed your relationship?

Dave: Our 10-year anniversary was a chance to celebrate our love and life away from the kids and the pressures of ministry. I was crazy busy trying to start our new church, as well as leading the Detroit Lions ministry as the team chaplain. I was never home. Ann was leading the home all by herself and overwhelmed with raising two very busy toddlers.

When she told me that she had lost her feelings for me, I knew that I had to find out why and how. As she shared her heart about moving from bitterness to numbness, I felt a strong nudge—probably more like a shove—from the Holy Spirit, that said, “Shut up and listen.”

Ed: Dave, what made you respond with prayer rather than reaching for your planner to persuade Ann that she was wrong?

Dave: I actually was about to pull out my daily planner to prove that I was home more than Ann thought when I sensed God saying to zip my lip and just let her talk. As I listened, I heard God say one more thing: “Repent.”

I knew that God was revealing to me that my relationship with Jesus had become lukewarm. I was so busy doing ministry for God that I had left God behind. God was saying that our horizontal marriage would never be what we wanted it to be unless I put Jesus back in first place.

So I got on my knees right there in the front seat of our Honda Accord and put Jesus back in control of my life. Ann did the same, and it was the start …

Continue reading…

The World Evangelical Alliance champions human rights and religious freedom within the United Nations.

As I walked into the United Nations building in New York to meet Secretary General Antonio Guterres, I recalled a preacher who predicted that this world body was the coming world government, as he said had been prophesied in The Revelation.

Added to that ominous prediction of its coming role, many view the United Nations as deeply flawed: often biased in its analyses and lacking ability to muster sufficient authority to mediate armed conflicts, such as Rwanda. Particularly disturbing is its Human Rights Council, which is comprised of representatives from countries guilty of violating human-rights such as Sudan and Saudi Arabia.

Even so, this is what national governments turn to for help in times of humanitarian crises and military debacles flowing from its mandate to promote peace, justice and human rights, even as they are doing today in Syria, Yemen, and Myanmar.

Here, the world community airs it grievances.

As a quasi-form of government that encompasses the world, it holds no executive power. Keep in mind that the five permanent members of Security Council has veto powers and can resort to the use of military force, yet the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council (HRC) work independently from the Security Council.

Because the HRC can’t resort to armed force, countries can refuse to collaborate with their investigations. Even so, the Security Council is so conflicted that it would be quite impossible for the members to join together in a world takeover as some allege is a possibility.

As influential as the UN is, it isn’t the only or ultimate source of settling human rights violations. While it does possess moral and legal authority as permitted by member countries, apart from intervention by the Security Council, …

Continue reading…