Author: Chris Boyd

The Incarnation exists for the Atonement, but it is also so much more.

Wait … is this actually on the Incarnation? If you take up Athanasius’s fourth-century classic On the Incarnation for your Advent or Christmas reading, you’ll likely find yourself asking this very question. For you’ll soon make the discovery that many Athanasius readers make: On the Incarnation is mostly not about the birth of Jesus.

On the topic of the baby in the manger, Athanasius has only a little bit to say. Everything he does say about it is certifiably mind-blowing: “The incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God comes into our realm, although he was not formerly distant. … But now he comes, condescending toward us in his love for human beings.” Merry Christmas!

But most of Athanasius’s narrative energy goes into telling us about the risen Lord who died and now lives forevermore. You might wonder where the Christmas in your Christmas reading went.

Part of the problem is that Athanasius has a great mind and a full heart and wants to share the whole truth. Helmut Thielicke once voiced the theologian’s can’t-say-it-all lament in exactly these seasonal terms: “I have to speak about everything at once like the preacher who cannot talk about Christmas without touching on the theme of Good Friday and pointing out that the crib and the cross are hewn out of the same wood.” But to everything there is a season, and we ought to be able to focus on the Incarnation during this season.

I remember the disappointment I felt going to church one Christmas when, for whatever reason, I was especially well attuned to the buildup of the whole holiday. It was one of those years when all the carols were really connecting with me, wherever I happened to hear …

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Thirty proverbs on power, justice, and politics.

The Book of Proverbs can be a humbling or even humiliating read. For every verse that lulls us into self-satisfaction of our righteousness comes another that aims its arrows at our own hearts too.

That incisive wisdom is particularly sharp when applied to election-year politics and our personal habits of political engagement. It’s uncanny enough to make us wonder whether King Solomon had foreseen cable news and Twitter. With another presidential election already underway, here are 30 proverbs for American politics in 2023.

On power

Proverbs doesn’t often directly address the subject of power, which is especially surprising for writings largely attributed to kings. Its authors envisioned a divinely appointed monarchy, a form of government far afield from our system, in which “many rulers” is not the result of rebellion (as in Proverbs 28:2) but constitutional design.

Yet that’s not to suggest the book has nothing to say of power as it works in our political context—far from it. Proverbs cautions us to be humble about our resources and abilities, to avoid grasping at power, and, if we find it in our hands, to remember it is often fleeting. Power can corrupt those who wield it, so we must take care to wield it justly.

Proverbs 16:32

Better a patient person than a warrior,
one with self-control than one who takes a city.

Proverbs 27:1, 24

Do not boast about tomorrow, and a crown is not secure for all generations.

Proverbs 31:4–5

It is not for kings, Lemuel—it is not for kings to drink wine, not for rulers to crave beer, lest they drink and forget what has been decreed, and deprive all the oppressed of their rights.

On tricks and transactions

We tend to think of political debates as arguments …

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The centuries-old tradition has returned to community theaters after a pandemic hiatus.

If you attend this year’s performance of Handel’s Messiah by the Des Moines Community Orchestra, you’ll walk into the sanctuary of Grace United Methodist Church and notice the orchestra, of course. But there’s no choir.

Isn’t Messiah famous for the exhilarating “Hallelujah” chorus? What about “For Unto Us a Child Is Born”?

This time, the choir is you—the audience, that is. You can borrow a score, and there are even markings among the seats to divide the audience by vocal part—soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, though sitting in your section is optional.

Messiah sing-alongs, also known as “Scratch Messiahs,” are a long-standing tradition in the United Kingdom and United States, dating back to the first half of the 19th century. Attendees get to step in and cocreate a centuries-old musical work that tells the story of Christ’s life from incarnation to resurrection.

For the Des Moines orchestra and many other community groups and ensembles around the country, this year is bringing a return of the tradition after a two-year pandemic hiatus.

“There’s nothing like conducting it,” said Carl Johnson, the conductor of the Des Moines Community Orchestra for the past 20 years. “It’s so big and powerful. And you look out at the audience, the looks on their faces … that’s worth it.”

Handel’s Messiah premiered in Dublin on April 13, 1742, as a charity concert benefiting two hospitals and prisoners’ debt relief. Although the work is now associated with Christmas, it is historically linked to Easter: Handel conducted annual Easter performances of Messiah at the Foundling Hospital in London beginning in …

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How a church is enduring uncertainty and disappointment as many struggle to find a home.

Since Wong Siu-yung opened a church for Hong Kong Christians in Taiwan last year, it attracted more than three dozen attendees. But in that time the only Cantonese-speaking church on the island has faced significant turnover.

A few congregants returned to their previous residence. But most of the 10 who departed moved to the United Kingdom.

“I watched them all give up and leave Taiwan,” Wong said. “Relocating for the second time in such a short period of time is very difficult.”

This week, Wong himself joined the exodus. The 48-year-old pastor boarded a flight Thursday to Nottingham, England, hopeful about making a new home more than 6,000 miles away. This wasn’t a journey Wong had anticipated when he left Hong Kong for Taiwan in July 2020. At the time, his involvement in the 2019 pro-democracy protests had made him a potential government target, so he decided to leave his homeland immediately.

Taiwan initially promised to provide “settlement and care” to thousands of Hong Kongers like Wong. But in the months since, the government has made it increasingly difficult for Hong Kongers to gain permanent residency, preventing many from working and settling on the island. Government officials fear that allowing Hong Kongers to resettle in Taiwan could provoke China and open the door to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) infiltrators.

Wong and his congregation have faced roadblock after roadblock: After selling their homes in Hong Kong, quitting their jobs, and pulling their kids out of school, they arrived in Taiwan to find the requirements to gain residency changed and their cases stuck in limbo. “Hong Kongers have fallen for [the Taiwanese government’s] great scam of the century,” …

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How evangelical computer programmers changed the way we read Scripture.

In the summer of 1979, just a few years after Jimmy Carter brought the term “born again” into the mainstream American lexicon and Steve Jobs made the home computer a part of everyday life, two engineers at Intel hatched a plan to create a new kind of technology company.

Kent Ochel and Bert Brown’s new endeavor would combine their religious faith and their lifelong desire to build their own company, enabling them to do something unprecedented—they would bring the Bible into the digital age and put it on every personal computer in the world. Early the next year in Austin, Texas, at the crossroads of the American Bible Belt and the burgeoning computer industry, they created Bible Research Systems and set to work merging their technical know-how with their love of Scripture.

In January 1982, they released the first version of The Word Processor for the Apple IIe, making it the first commercial Bible study software on the market. Softalk magazine hailed it for including a complete and searchable text of the King James Bible, promising it would “aid the serious Bible student” and comparing Ochel and Brown’s accomplishments to Gutenberg’s printing press.

As the personal computer industry and Bible software market grew alongside one another in the 1980s, scholars and religious people alike began to wonder if computers might fundamentally change religion and, more specifically, how the shift from printed books to electronic media would transform the practices of Christians, who for centuries had been called “the people of the book.” What would happen to Christians as they became “the people of the screen”?

Before the advent of Bible software, Christianity had undergone …

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As a missionary to this “prodigal continent,” here’s how I see church planting, the prayer movement, and diaspora churches making a difference.

Post-Christian. Secular. A prodigal continent. These are some of the words often used to describe Christianity in Europe.

Yet, a growing number of voices believe God is not done with Europe.

“Renewed spiritual hunger, new stirring of prayer, fresh expressions of the church, [and] migrant churches restoring faith” are signs of hope in our continent today, writes former Europe YWAM director Jeff Fountain.

Could it be that, in the midst of this spiritual desert, God might be springing new streams of living waters, or even seeds for revival?

It would certainly not be the first time that God changes the narrative of a continent.

Only decades ago, Protestants described Latin America as a mission field. Today, it’s become a mission force, and the Brazilian church sends the second most missionaries in the world. In 1900, Africa was home to about nine million Christians. Who could ever have imagined that by the 2020s there would be half a billion Christians on the continent?

But the missional challenges for Christians in Europe are overwhelming.

“Europe is one of the toughest regions in the world in which to bear witness to Christ. The combination of the three-headed monster of secularism, pluralism and materialism make Christian witness difficult across the Continent,” says Lindsay Brown, former general secretary of IFES (International Fellowship of Evangelical Students).

The old continent has a complex and unique history with the Christian faith.

“No other continent has been exposed to Christianity for such a prolonged period and in such an extensive way,” wrote Jim Memory, the Lausanne Europe co-regional director, in the Europe 2021 Missiological Report. “Yet just as Europe was the first continent …

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The Village Church offers few details about process it says was successful.

Matt Chandler returned to the pulpit of The Village Church on Sunday, restored to ministry by the Texas church’s elders a little more than three months after he took a leave of absence to deal with what one elder called “some challenges that arose.”

A few minutes later, 48-year-old Chandler started preaching about sin.

“It is my understanding that I have fallen short of the glory of God and he has met me with grace,” he said. “It is my understanding that I am inconsistent and I do have spots that are hypocritical, and there are parts of me I don’t even understand.”

Quoting Ephesians 2:13–17, Chandler urged the congregation to see that the true promise of Christmas is reconciliation with God. But that can only start, he said, if people acknowledge their sin, as he himself had done on that same stage in late August.

“To humble ourselves before a living God gives us a shot at peace,” he preached. “I’ve got a part of this I’ve got to own. It might just be 1 percent, but that’s my 1 percent. Forgive me. Now we’ve got a shot at reconciliation.”

While he acknowledged his sinfulness again on Sunday, Chandler didn’t offer any more details about the situation that led to his leave of absence. In late August, he confessed to an inappropriate online relationship with a woman he was direct messaging on Instagram. Chandler said at the time that the ongoing exchange was neither sexual nor secret—his wife knew about it—but the church’s elders were nonetheless concerned “about frequency and familiarity,” and specifically “a familiarity that played itself out in coarse and foolish joking.”

A statement …

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It’s not the threat of divine surveillance but the extension of divine love that changes our hearts.

Around this time of year, some people argue about whether the baristas at their local coffee franchises should say “Happy Holidays” or “Merry Christmas.” Others argue about whether their churches should hang Christmas wreaths before the end of Advent. Still others focus on more hotly debated points—such as whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie or whether Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is festive or annoying.

All the while, we are leaving unattended a debate that might tell us something about the state of American religion. I’m referring, of course, to the Elf on the Shelf.

Sold alongside a book of the same name, first published in 2005, the Elf on the Shelf is a plastic figure, bedecked in a long cap, that perches on the mantles (and various other spots) of some American homes. The elf is said to be a scout for Santa Claus, helping him determine who’s naughty and who’s nice. For some, the elf is uncannily eerie—the way creepy children in horror movies can be.

A decade ago, journalist Kate Tuttle argued in The Atlantic that the Elf on the Shelf is “a marketing juggernaut dressed up as a ‘tradition.’” She listed many reasons she hated the practice, but her most pointed one was the conceit behind the whole thing: teaching children that it’s all right to be spied on. The elf, after all, sits on his perch from Thanksgiving to Christmas to see whether kids keep the rules and behave.

While Tuttle might be right that there’s “something uniquely fake about the Elf,” the idea of controlling behavior with the notion that someone “sees you when you’re sleeping” and “knows when …

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Risks remain higher in cross-cultural contexts. And misconduct is harder to report.

When Letta Cartlidge got on a plane as a teenager to leave her childhood home, she carried a secret. As the child of missionaries in Nigeria, she was sexually abused by a teacher at a school for missionary kids.

As the plane rose above Nigeria, she believed she would have to carry that secret forever. She thought that if she ever reported him—if she even knew how to report her abuser—it would hurt God’s reputation.

“We were in a culture where there was a looming God,” she told CT almost 30 years later. “And that looming God would punish us for disrupting the work of God.”

Cartlidge would, eventually, decide that wasn’t true. As an adult she found the courage to lead fellow former Hillcrest School students in what she calls an “incredibly discouraging” year-and-a-half effort to bring to light more than 40 allegations of abuse spanning from 1961 to 1993. The alumni won a small victory in August, when the school board voted unanimously to approve an external investigation.

It’s a step in the right direction.

Missionary organizations and Christian nonprofits have started paying increased attention to the safety of workers’ children—“missionary kids,” commonly called MKs—and advocates say the past few decades have seen marked improvement. But the rates of abuse are still high.

A recent survey of 1,904 adults who were raised in cross-cultural contexts found they were three times more likely to experience emotional abuse than children raised in their own culture in the United States. More than a third had suffered three or more adverse childhood experiences, such as abuse, violence, or neglect. Almost 30 percent reported some kind of sexual …

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MAF’s Ryan Koher and two South African volunteers have been detained since November 4 on suspicion of helping Islamist insurgents in Cabo Delgado.

An American missionary pilot has been detained for nearly a month in Mozambique on suspicion of supporting insurgents in the southern African nation.

Ryan Koher, 31, serving with Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) through its Mozambican partner Ambassador Aviation Ltd. (AAL), had been due to fly vitamins and other supplies to church-run orphanages in the Montepuez district in the troubled Cabo Delgado Province in the far north.

But he was detained November 4 along with two South African volunteers in the coastal city of Inhambane, far to the south.

The two South Africans, 77-year-old W. J. du Plessis and 69-year-old Eric Dry, had brought in the supplies but police stopped them from being loaded aboard Koher’s Cessna aircraft.

Koher has now been moved to a maximum security prison in Maputo Province, southern Mozambique.

MAF says Koher is innocent. Its president and CEO, David Holsten, called today on the Mozambican authorities to release the pilot so that he can be reunited with his wife and two sons before Christmas.

“I urge Christians around the world to pray for Ryan’s safety and swift release, and call on those in power both in Mozambique and here in the US to do everything they can to resolve this wrongful detainment,” said Holsten in a statement.

“Ryan is a caring and gentle individual,” he added. “Over the last couple of years, he and his wife have worked hard to learn the language and culture of Mozambique to better serve those who rely on our service.”

A profile of the family on MAF’s website says the couple takes inspiration from Matthew 12:21 by wanting “to share the hope of Christ with isolated people.”

Koher’s wife, Annabel, and two sons, Elias and …

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